No more than doth the miller there, Surely the wiser time shall come In that new childhood of the Earth Fresh blood in Time's shrunk veins make mirth, And labor meet delight half-way. AN INTERVIEW WITH MILES STANDISH. SAT one evening in my room, half gloom, Throng through the spirit's skylight; The flames by fits curled round the bars, While embers dropped like falling stars, I sat and mused; the fire burned low, The heads of ancient wise men) Smoothed down their knotted fronts, and grew As rosy as excisemen. My antique high-backed Spanish chair The oak that made its sturdy frame The ox whose fortunate hide became It came out in that famous bark, Capacious as another ark For furniture decrepit ; For, as that saved of bird and beast So has the seed of these increased Kings sit, they say, in slippery seats; Of ice the northern voyager meets I offer to all bores this perch, Salt of the earth! in what queer Guys My wonder, then, was not unmixed Whose doublet plain and plainer hose Now even such men as Nature forms Who knows, thought I, but he has come, To tell me of a mighty sum Behind my wainscot buried? There is a buccaneerish air About that garb outlandish Just then the ghost drew up his chair “I come from Plymouth, deadly bored “We had some toughness in our grain, The eye to rightly see us is Not just the one that lights the brain "He had stiff knees, the Puritan, 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. |