There muse I of old times, old hopes, old friends,

Old friends! The writing of those words has borne

My fancy backward to the gracious past, The generous past, when all was possible,

For all was then untried; the years between

Have taught some sweet, some bitter lessons, none

Wiser than this, to spend in all things else,

But of old friends to be most miserly. Each year to ancient friendships adds a ring,

As to an oak, and precious more and more,

Without deservingness or help of ours, They grow, and, silent, wider spread, each year,

Their unbought ring of shelter or of shade.

Sacred to me the lichens on the bark, Which Nature's milliners would scrape

Till it possessed me wholly, and thought ceased,

Or was transfused in something to which thought

Is coarse and dull of sense. lost,

Myself was

Gone from me like an ache, and what remained

Became a part of the universal joy. My soul went forth, and, mingling with the tree,

Danced in the leaves; or, floating in the cloud,

Saw its white double in the stream below;

Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy,
Dilated in the broad blue over all.
I was the wind that dappled the lush
grass,

The tide that crept with coolness to its roots,

The thin-winged swallow skating on the air;

The life that gladdened everything was mine.

Was I then truly all that I beheld?
Or is this stream of being but a glass
Where the mind sees its visionary self,
As, when the kingfisher flits o'er his
bay,

Across the river's hollow heaven below His picture flits, - another, yet the same? But suddenly the sound of human voice Or footfall, like the drop a chemist pours,

Doth in opacous cloud precipitate
The consciousness that seemed but now
dissolved

Into an essence rarer than its own,
And I am narrowed to myself once more.

seats,

Making an o'erturned box their table. Oft

The shrilling girls sit here between school hours,

And play at What's my thought like? while the boys,

With whom the age chivalric ever bides, Pricked on by knightly spur of female eyes,

Climb high to swing and shout on perilous boughs,

Or, from the willow's armory equipped With musket dumb, green banner, edgeless sword,

Make good the rampart of their tree

redoubt

'Gainst eager British storming from below,

And keep alive the tale of Bunker's Hill.

Here, too, the men that mend our village ways,

Vexing McAdam's ghost with pounded slate,

Their nooning take; much noisy talk they spend

On horses and their ills; and, as John Bull

Tells of Lord This or That, who was his friend,

So these make boast of intimacies long With famous teams, and add large estimates,

By competition swelled from mouth to mouth,

Of how much they could draw, till one, ill pleased

To have his legend overbid, retorts: "You take and stretch truck-horses in a string

From here to Long Wharf end, one thing I know,

Not heavy neither, they could never draw,

Ensign's long bow!" Then laughter loud and long.

So they in their leaf-shadowed micro

cosm

Image the larger world; for wheresoe'er Ten men are gathered, the observant eye Will find mankind in little, as the stars Glide up and set, and all the heavens revolve

In the small welkin of a drop of dew.

I love to enter pleasure by a postern, Not the broad popular gate that gulps the mob;

To find my theatres in roadside nooks, Where men are actors, and suspect it not;

Where Nature all unconscious works her will,

And every passion moves with human gait,

Unhampered by the buskin or the train. Hating the crowd, where we gregarious

men

Lead lonely lives, I love society, Nor seldom find the best with simple souls

Unswerved by culture from their native bent,

The ground we meet on being primal

man

And nearer the deep bases of our lives.

But O, half heavenly, earthly half, my soul,

Canst thou from those late ecstasies descend,

Thy lips still wet with the miraculous

wine

That transubstantiates all thy baser stuff To such divinity that soul and sense, Once more commingled in their source, are lost,

Canst thou descend to quench a vulgar thirst

With the mere dregs and rinsings of the world?

Well, if my nature find her pleasure

So,

I am content, nor need to blush; I take

My little gift of being clean from God,
Not haggling for a better, holding it
Good as was ever any in the world,
My days as good and full of miracle.
I pluck my nutriment from any bush,
Finding out poison as the first men
did

By tasting and then suffering, if I must.
Sometimes my bush burns, and some-

times it is

A leafless wilding shivering by the wall; But I have known when winter barberries

O, benediction of the higher mood
And human-kindness of the lower! for

both

I will be grateful while I live, nor question

The wisdom that hath made us what we are,

With such large range as from the alehouse bench

Can reach the stars and be with both at home.

They tell us we have fallen on prosy days,

Condemned to glean the leavings of earth's feast

Where gods and heroes took delight of old;

But though our lives, moving in one dull round

Of repetition infinite, become Stale as a newspaper once read, and though

History herself, seen in her workshop,

seem

To have lost the art that dyed those glorious panes,

Rich with memorial shapes of saint and

sage,

That_pave with splendor the Past's dusky aisles,

Panes that enchant the light of common day

With colors costly as the blood of kings,

Till with ideal hues it edge our thought,

Yet while the world is left, while nature lasts,

And man the best of nature, there shall be

Somewhere contentment for these human hearts,

Some freshness, some unused material For wonder and for song. I lose myself In other ways where solemn guide-posts

say,

This way to Knowledge, This way to Repose,

But here, here only, I am ne'er betrayed,

For every by-path leads me to my love.

God's passionless reformers, influences,

prise

Of savor whose mere harshness seemed divine.

Shall man say whence your virtue is, or how

Ye make medicinal the wayside weed?

So mused I once within my willow-tent One brave June morning, when the bluff northwest,

Thrusting aside a dank and snuffling day

That made us bitter at our neighbors' sins,

bridge

Thundered, and then was silent; on the roofs

The sun-warped shingles rippled with the heat;

Summer on field and hill, in heart and brain,

All life washed clean in this high tide of June.

sparkling cheer

And roared a lusty stave; the sliding Charles,

Blue toward the west, and bluer and

more blue,

Living and lustrous as a woman's eyes

wise

Endued the realm with brain and hands and eyes,

He sought on every side men brave and just;

And having heard our mountain shepherd's praise,

ward curve

hair

gold;

From blossom-clouded orchards, far

Than in his crook before; but envy finds

More food in cities than on mountains

bare;

And the frank sun of natures clear and

rare

Breeds poisonous fogs in low and marish minds.