melt away, The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, As pale as formal candles lit by day; Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind; The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play, Show pearly breakers combing o'er their lee, White crests as of some just enchanted sea, Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway. But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant, From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, And the roused Charles remembers in his veins Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost, That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost And states shall move free-limbed, loosed In dreary wreck, and crumbling desola Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like de vice, With leaden pools between or gullies bare, The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice; No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, Beyond the hillock's house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, Where Coptic tombs resound with. prayer and praise, Where dust and mud the equal year divide, There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died, Or when the close-wedged fields of ice Transfiguring street and shop with his The early evening with her misty dyes Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, illumined gaze. But as a boy, who looks alike on all, That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call; Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame That thither many times the Painter came; And tones the landscape down, and One elin yet bears his name, a feathery soothes the wearied eyes. There gleams my native village, dear to me, Though higher change's waves each day are seen, Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, Sanding with houses the diminished green; There, in red brick, which softening time defies, Stand square factories; and stiff the Muses' tree and tall. Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow, Our only sure possession is the past; The village blacksmith died a month ago, And dim to me the forge's roaring blast; Soon fire-new mediævals we shall see Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree, How with my life knit up is every well. And that hewn down, perhaps, the bee known scene! hive green and vast. How many times, prouder than Loosed from the village school-dame's Panting have I the creaky bellows And watched the pent volcano's red increase, Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down By that hard arm voluminous and brown, From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees. Dear native town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,- to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day, And when the westering sun half sunken burns, The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, broke, The westward horseman rides through And without her the impoverished sea clouds of gold away, sons roll. For in thy bounds I reverently laid To away That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky, snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine, Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor, Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow | Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never groped its way 'Twixt the frothed gnashing tusks of some ship-crunching bay. So, pine-like, the legend grew, stronglimbed and tall, As the Gypsy child grows that eats crusts in the hall; It sucked the whole strength of the earth and the sky, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, all brought it supply; 'T was a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there, True part of the landscape as sea, land, and air; For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was To force these wild births of the woods under glass, And so, if 't is told as it should be told, Though 't were sung under Venice's moonlight of gold, You would hear the old voice of its mother, the pine, Murmur sealike and northern through every line, And the verses should grow, self-sus tained and free, let in, Since the day of creation, the light and the din Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed From the midnight primeval its armful of shade, And has kept the weird Past with its child faith alive Mid the hum and the stir of To-day's busy hive, There the legend takes root in the agegathered gloom, And its murmurous boughs for their sagas find room. Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goes Groping down to the sea 'neath his mountainous snows; Where the lake's frore Sahara of nevertracked white, When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost, As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost; Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires that throw Their own threatening shadows far round o'er the snow, When the wolf howls aloof, and the wavering glare Flashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear, When the wood's huge recesses, halflighted, supply A canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try, Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not down Through the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town, But skulk in the depths of the measureless wood Mid the Dark's creeping whispers that curdle the blood, When the eye, glanced in dread o'er the shoulder, may dream, Ere it shrinks to the camp-fire's companioning gleam, That it saw the fierce ghost of the Red There the old shapes crowd thick round | This fruitless husk which dustward dries Hath been a heart once, hath been the pine-shadowed camp, Which shun the keen gleam of the schol arly lamp, And the seed of the legend finds true Norland ground, While the border-tale 's told and the canteen flits round. young; On this bowed head the awful Past But look! whose shadows block the door? Who are those two that stand aloof? See on my hands this freshening gore Writes o'er again its crimson proof! My looked-for death-bed guests are met; There my dead Youth doth wring its hands, And there, with eyes that goad me yet, The ghost of my Ideal stands! God bends from out the deep and says, "I gave thee the great gift of life; Wast thou not called in many ways? Are not my earth and heaven at strife? I gave thee of my seed to sow, Bringest thou me my hundred-fold?" Can I look up with face aglow, And answer, "Father, here is gold"? |