"We had some toughness in our grain, Half rose the ghost, and half drew out The eye to rightly see us is Not just the one that lights the brain Of drawing-room Tyrtæuses: They talk about their Pilgrim blood, Their birthright high and holy! A mountain-stream that ends in mud Methinks is melancholy. "He had stiff knees, the Puritan, That were not good at bending; The homespun dignity of man He thought was worth defending He did not, with his pinchbeck ore, His country's shame forgotten, Gild Freedom's coffin o'er and o'er, When all within was rotten. The ghost of his old broadsword, Then thrust it slowly back again, And said, with reverent gesture, "No, Freedom, no! blood should not stain The hem of thy white vesture. "I feel the soul in me draw near The streaks of first forewarning, And they who sowed the light shall reap The golden sheaves of morning. A MODERN INSTANCE OF A WISE SAW. NINETEEN years ago I was walking through the Franconia Notch, and stopped to chat with a hermit, who fed with gradual logs the unwearied teeth of a sawmill. As the strident steel slit off the slabs of the log, so did the less willing machine of talk, acquiring a steadier up-and-down motion, pare away that outward bark of conversation which protects the core, and which, like other bark, has naturally most to do with the weather, the season, and the heat of the day. At length I asked him the best point of view for the Old Man of the Mountain. Too young and too happy either to feel or affect the Horatian indifference, I was sincerely astonished, and I expressed it. The log-compelling man attempted no justification, but after a little asked, "Come from Baws'n?" "Yes" (with peninsular pride). "Goodle to see in the vycinity o' Baws'n." "Oh yes!" I said, and I thought, See Boston and die! see the State Houses, old and new, the caterpillar wooden bridges crawling with innumerable legs across the flats of Charles; see the Common, -largest park, doubtless, in the world, with its files of trees planted as if by a drill-sergeant, and then for your Nunc dimittis! "I should like, 'awl, I should like to stan' on Bunker Hill. You've ben there offen, likely?" "N-o-o," unwillingly, seeing the little end of the horn in clear vision at the terminus of this Socratic perspective. "'Awl, my young frien', you 've larned neow thet wut a man kin see any day for nawthin', childern half price, he never doos see. Nawthin' pay, nawthin' vally." With this modern instance of a wise saw, I departed, deeply revolving these things with myself, and convinced that, whatever the ratio of population, the average amount of human nature to the square mile differs little the world over. I thought of it when I saw people upon the Pincian wondering at the alchemist sun, as if he never burned the leaden clouds to gold in sight of Charles Street. I thought of it when I found eyes first discovering at Mont Blanc how beautiful snow was. As I walked on, I said to myself, There is one exception, wise hermit, it is just these gratis pictures which the poet puts in his show-box, and which we all gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest for a peep at. The divine faculty is to see what everybody can look at. —A Moosehead Journal. - 26 RIPPLING through thy branches goes the sunshine, The soul once of some tremulous inland river, Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb forever! While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine, Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended, I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands, And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence. On the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet, Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad, Dripping round thy slim white stem, whose shadow Slopes quivering down the water's dusky quiet, Thou shrink'st as on her bath's edge would some startled Naiad. Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers ; Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping; Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience, Thou art to me like my beloved maiden, So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences; |
