My glad feet shod with the glittering steel

I was the god of the wingèd heel.

The hills in the far white sky were lost;

The world lay still in the wide white frost;

And the woods hung hushed in their long white dream

By the ghostly, glimmering, ice-blue stream.

Here was a pathway, smooth like glass,

Where I and the wandering wind might pass

To the far-off palaces, drifted deep,

Where Winter's retinue rests in sleep.

I followed the lure, I fled like a bird,

Till the startled hollows awoke and heard

A spinning whisper, a sibilant twang,

As the stroke of the steel on the tense ice rang;

And the wandering wind was left behind

As faster, faster I followed my mind;

Till the blood sang high in my eager brain,

And the joy of my flight was almost pain.

The I stayed the rush of my eager speed

And silently went as a drifting seed, —

Slowly, furtively, till my eyes

Grew big with the awe of a dim surmise,

And the hair of my neck began to creep

At hearing the wilderness talk in sleep.

Shapes in the fir-gloom drifted near.

In the deep of my heart I heard my fear.

And I turned and fled, like a soul pursued,

From the white, inviolate solitude.

By Charles G.D. Roberts