But all through the glowing summer The blossomless tree throve fair, And the fruit waxed ripe and mellow, With sunny rain and air;

And when the dim October

With golden death was crowned, Under its heavy branches

The tree stooped to the ground.

In youth there comes a west wind,
Blowing our bloom away,—
A chilly breath of Autumn
Out of the lips of May.

We bear the ripe fruit after,

Ah, me! for the thought of pain! We know the sweetness and beauty And the heart-bloom never again.

11.

One sails away to sea,—

One stands on the shore and cries; The ship goes down the world, and the light On the sullen water dies.

The whispering shell is mute,—

And after is evil cheer:

She shall stand on the shore and cry in vain,
Many and many a year.

But the stately, wide-winged ship
Lies wrecked on the unknown deep;
Far under, dead in his coral bed,
The lover lics asleep.

III.

In the wainscot ticks the death-watch,
Chirps the cricket in the floor,
In the distance dogs are barking,
Feet go by outside my door.

From her window honeysuckles
Stealing in upon the gloom,
Spice and sweets embalm the silence
'Dead within the lonesome room.

And the ghost of that dead silence Haunts me ever, thin and chill, In the pauses of the death-watch, When the cricket's cry is still.

IV.

She stands in silks of purple,

Like a splendid flower in bloom,
She moves, and the air is laden
With delicate perfume.

The over-vigilant mamma
Can never let her be:

She must play this march for another,
And sing that song for me.

I wonder if she remembers
The song I made for her:
"The hopes of love are frailer
Than lines of gossamer :"

Made when we strolled together
Through fields of happy June,
And our hearts kept time together,
With birds and brooks in tune,-

And I was so glad of loving,

That I must mimic grief, And, trusting in love forever, Must fable unbelief.

I did not hear the prelude,

I was thinking of these old things. She is fairer and wiser and older Than What is it she sings!

"The hopes of love are frailer
Than lines of gossamer."
Alas! the bitter wisdom
Of the song I made for her!

V.

All the long August afternoon, The little drowsy stream Whispers a melancholy tune, As if it dreamed of June

And whispered in its dream.

The thistles show beyond the brook Dust on their down and bloom, And out of many a weed-grown nook The aster-flowers look

With eyes of tender gloom.

The silent orchard aisles are sweet With smell of ripening fruit. Through the sere grass, in shy retreat, Flutter, at coming feet,

The robins strange and mute.

There is no wind to stir the leaves, The harsh leaves overhead; Only the querulous cricket grieves, And shrilling locust weaves

A song of summer dead.

BEFORE THE GATE.

THEY gave the whole long day to idle laughter, To fitful song and jest,

To moods of soberness as idle, after,

And silences, as idle too as the rest.

But when at last upon their way returning,
Taciturn, late, and loath,

Through the broad meadow in the sunset burning,

They reached the gate, one sweet spell hindered them both.

Her heart was troubled with a subtile anguish Such as but women know

That wait, and lest love speak or speak not languish,

And what they would, would rather they would not so;

Till he said,-man-like nothing comprehending Of all the wondrous guile

That women won win themselves with, and bending

Eyes of relentless asking on her the while,

"Ah, if beyond this gate the path united Our steps as far as death,

And I might open it!" His voice, affrighted At its own daring, faltered under his breath.

Then she-whom both his faith and fear enchanted

Far beyond words to tell,
Feeling her woman's finest wit had wanted

The art he had that knew to blunder so well

AH me! is it, then true that the year has waxed unto waning,

And that so soon must remain nothing but lapse and decay,

Earliest cricket, that out of the midsummer midnight complaining,

All the faint summer in me takest with subtle dismay?

Though thou bringest no dream of frost to the flowers that slumber,

Though no tree for its leaves, doomed of thy voice, maketh moan;

With the unconscious earth's boded evil my soul thou dost cumber,

And in the year's lost youth makest me still lose my own.

Answerest thou, that when nights of December are blackest and bleakest,

And when the fervid grate feigns me a May in my room,

And by my hearthstone gay, as now sad in my garden, thou creakest,

Thou wilt again give me all,-dew and fra grance and bloom?

Nay, little poet! full many a cricket I have that is willing,

If I but take him down out of his place on my shelf,

Me blither lays to sing than the blithest known to thy shrilling,

Full of the rapture of life, May, morn, hope, and-himself:

Leaving me only the sadder; for never one of my singers

Lures back the bee to his feast, calls back the

bird to his tree.

Hast thou no art can make me believe, while the summer yet lingers,

Better than bloom that has been red leaf and sere that must be?

THE POET'S FRIENDS.

THE Robin sings in the elm;

The cattle stand beneath, Sedate and grave, with great brown eyes, And fragrant meadow-breath.

They listen to the flattered bird,

The wise-looking, stupid things! And they never understand a word Of all the Robin sings.

WHILE I recline

At ease beneath

This immemorial pine,

Small sphere!—

By dusky fingers brought this morning here,
And shown with boastful smiles,-

I turn thy cloven sheath,

Through which the soft white fibres peer,
That, with their gossamer bands,

Unite, like love, the sea-divided lands,
And slowly, thread by thread,
Draw forth the folded strands,

Than which the trembling line,

By whose frail help yon startled spider fled

Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed,
Is scarce more fine;

And as the tangled skein
Unravels in my hands,

Betwixt me and the noon-day light

A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles
The landscape broadens on my sight,
As, in the little boll, there lurked a spell
Like that which, in the ocean shell,
With mystic sound,

Breaks down the narrow walls that hem us

round,

And turns some city lane

Into the restless main,

With all his capes and isles!

Yonder bird,

Which floats, as if at rest,

In those blue tracts above the thunder, where
No vapors cloud the stainless air,
And never sound is heard,

Unless at such rare time

When, from the City of the Blest,
Rings down some golden chime,-

Sees not from his high place

So vast a cirque of summer space

As widens round me in one mighty field,
Which, rimmed by seas and sands,

Doth hail its earliest daylight in the beams
Of gray Atlantic dawns;

And, broad as realms made up of many lands,
Is lost afar

Behind the crimson hills and purple lawns
Of sunset, among plains which roll their streams
Against the Evening Star!

And lo!

To the remotest point of sight,

Although I gaze upon no waste of snow,
The endless field is white;
And the whole landscape glows,

For many a shining league away,

With such accumulated light

As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic

day!

Nor lack there (for the vision grows,

And the small charm within my hands-
More potent even than the fabled one,
Which oped whatever golden mystery
Lay hid in fairy wood or magic vale,

The curious ointment of the Arabian tale-
Beyond all mortal sense

Doth stretch my sight's horizon, and I see
Beneath its simple influence,

As if, with Uriel's crown,

I stood in some great temple of the Sun,
And looked, as Uriel, down)-

Nor lack there pastures rich and fields all green
With all the common gifts of God,

For temperate airs and torrid sheen
Weave Edens of the sod;

Through lands which look one sea of billowy

An unknown forest girds them grandly round,
In whose dark shades a future navy sleeps!
Ye stars, which though unseen, yet with ine gaze
Upon this loveliest fragment of the earth!
Thou Sun, that kindlest all thy gentlest rays
Above it, as to light a favorite hearth!
Ye clouds, that in your temples in the West
See nothing brighter than its humblest flowers!
And, you, ye Winds, that on the ocean's breast
Are kissed to coolness ere ye reach its bowers!
Bear witness with me in my song of praise,
And tell the world that, since the world began.
No fairer land hath fired a poet's lays,
Or given a home to man!

But these are charms already widely blown!
His be the meed whose pencil's trace
Hath touched our very swamps with grace,
And round whose tuneful way

All Southern laurels bloom;

The Poet of "The Woodlands," unto whom
Alike are known

The flute's low breathing and the trumpet's tone,
And the soft west-wind's sighs;
But who shall utter all the debt,

O Land! wherein all powers are met
That bind a people's heart,

The world doth owe thee at this day,
And which it never can repay,

Yet scarcely deigns to own!

Where sleeps the poet who shall fitly sing
The source wherefrom doth spring

That mighty commerce which, confined
To the mean channels of no selfish mart,
Goes out to every shore

Of this broad earth, and throngs the sea with ships

That bear no thunders; hushes hungry lips
In alien lands;

Joins with a delicate web remotest strands;
And gladdening rich and poor,

Doth gild Parisian domes,

Or feed the cottage-smoke of English homes,
And only bounds its blessings by mankind?
In offices like these, thy mission lies,
My Country! and it shall not end

As long as rain shall fall and Heaven bend
In blue above thee; though thy foes be hard
And cruel as their weapons, it shall guard
Thy hearthstones as a bulwark; make thee
great

In white and bloodless state;

And, haply, as the years increase

Still working through its humbler reach
With that large wisdom which the ages teach-
Revive the half-dead dream of universal peace!
As men who labor in that mine

Of Cornwall, hollowed out beneath the bed
Of
ocean, when a storm rolls overhead,
Hear the dull booming of the world of brine
Above them, and a mighty muffled roar

Of winds and waters, and yet toil calmly on,
And split the rock, and pile the massive ore,
Or carve a niche, or shape the arched roof;
So I, as calmly, weave my woof
Of song, chanting the days to come,
Unsilenced, though the quiet summer air
Stirs with the bruit of battles, and each dawn
Wakes from its starry silence to the hum
Of many gathering armies.

In that we sometimes hear,

Still,

Upon the Northern winds the voice of woe

Not wholly drowned in triumph, though I know
The end must crown us, and a few brief years
Dry all our tears,

I may not sing too gladly. To Thy will
Resigned, O Lord! we cannot all forget

That there is much even Victory must regret.
And, therefore, not too long

From the great burden of our country's wrong Delay our just release!

And, if it may be, save

These sacred fields of peace

From stain of patriot or of hostile blood!
Oh, help us, Lord! to roll the crimson flood
Back on its course, and, while our banners wing
Northward, strike with us! till the Goth shall
cling

To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave
Mercy; and we shall grant it, and dictate
The lenient future of his fate

There, where some rotting ships and trembling

Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns
Its fragrant lamps, and turns

Into a royal court with green festoons
The banks of dark lagoons.

In the deep heart of every forest tree
The blood is all aglee,

And there's a look about the leafless bowers
As if they dreamed of flowers.

Yet still on every side appears the hand
Of Winter in the land,

Save where the maple reddens on the lawn,
Flushed by the season's dawn;

Or where, like those strange semblances we find
That age to childhood bind,

The elm puts on, as if in Nature's scorn,
The brown of Autumn corn.

As yet the turf is dark, although you know
That not a span below,

A thousand germs are groping through the gloom,

And soon will burst their tomb.

Already, here and there, on frailest stems Appear some azure gems,

Small as might deck, upon a gala-day, The forehead of a fay.

In gardens you may see, amid the dearth,
The crocus breaking earth;

And near the snowdrop's tender white and green,
The violet in its screen.

But many gleams and shadows need must pass Along the budding grass,

And weeks go by, before the enamored South Shall kiss the rose's mouth.

Still there's a sense of blossoms yet unborn
In the sweet airs of morn;

One almost looks to see the very street
Grow purple at his feet.

At times a fragrant breeze comes floating by,
And brings, you know not why,

A feeling as when eager crowds await
Before a palace gate

Some wondrous pageant; and you scarce wonld start,

If from a beech's heart

A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say, "Behold me! I am May!'

Ah! who would couple thoughts of war and crime

With such a blessed time!"

Who in the west-wind's aromatic breath
Could hear the call of Death!

Yet not more surely shall the Spring awake
The voice of wood and brake,

Than she shall rouse, for all her tranquil charms
A million men to arms.

CALM as that second summer which precedes
The first fall of the snow,

In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds,
The city bides the foe.

As yet, behind their ramparts, stern and proud,
Her bolted thunders sleep-

Dark Sumter, like a battlemented cloud,
Looms o'er the solemn deep.

No Calpe frowns from lofty cliff or scaur
To guard the holy strand;

But Moultrie holds in leash her dogs of war,
Above the level sand.

And down the dunes a thousand guns lie couched,
Unseen, beside the flood-

Like tigers in some Orient jungle crouched,
That wait and watch for blood.

Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade,

Walk grave and thoughtful men,

Whose hands may one day wield the patriot's

blade

As lightly as the pen.

And maidens, with such eyes as would grow dim Over a bleeding hound,

Seem each one to have caught the strength of him

Whose sword she sadly bound.

Thus girt without and garrisoned at home,
Day patient following day,

Old Charleston looks from roof, and spire, and dome,

Across her tranquil bay.

Ships, through a hundred foes, from Saxon lands
And spicy Indian ports,

Bring Saxon steel and iron to her hands,
And summer to her courts.

THE UNKNOWN DEAD.

THE rain is plashing on my sill,
But all the winds of Heaven are still;
And so,
it falls with that dull sound
Which thrills us in the churchyard ground,
When the first spadeful drops like lead
Upon the coffin of the dead.

Beyond my streaming window-pane,

I cannot see the neighboring vane,
Yet from its old familiar tower

The bell comes, muffled, through the shower.
What strange and unsuspected link

Of feeling touched has made me think-
While with a vacant soul and eye

I watch that gray and stony sky-
Of nameless graves on battle-plains,
Washed by a single winter's rains,
Where, some beneath Virginian hills,
And some by green Atlantic rills,
Some by the waters of the West,
A myriad unknown heroes rest?
Ah! not the chiefs who, dying, see
Their flags in front of victory,
Or, at their life-blood's noblest cost
Pay for a battle nobly lost,

Claim from their monumental beds
The bitterest tears a nation sheds.
Beneath yon lonely mound-the spot,
By all save some fond few, forgot-
Lie the true martyrs of the fight,
Which strikes for freedom and for right.
Of them, their patriot zeal and pride,
The lofty faith that with them died,
No grateful page shall further tell
Than that so many bravely fell;
And we can only dimly guess

What worlds of all this world's distress,
What utter woe, despair, and dearth,
Their fate has brought to many a hearth.
Just such a sky as this should weep
Above them, always, where they sleep;
Yet, haply, at this very hour,
Their graves are like a lover's bower;
And Nature's self, with eyes unwet,
Oblivions of the crimson debt
To which she owes her April grace,
Laughs gayly o'er their burial-place.