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THE SILENT PLACES
I have come back from the mountains, And the beauty of forest ways, From the pine-trail winding at sunset To the crags in the purple haze.
I have come back from the prairies, And the free-born winds of the west, Where my soul reached out to heaven, And found in the starlight rest.
I have come back to the city,
With its clang and its screech and its din;
Its halls are filled with madness, And its eyes are blind with sin.
I think of the peaks white-crested, And the sage on the sweeping plain, And the vastness, and the silence, And the whisper of God again.
I will go back to my mountains, Back to the prairies I've trod;
Someday I shall stand in that silence And speak once more with my God.
HAROLD M. HILDRETH