The Skater

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.