AN INCIDENT OF THE FIRE AT HAMBURG.The tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies,Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries;You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art,They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart.Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak,Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke;And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone,Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone.It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough,A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough;The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint, harmonious lines,And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines.Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better rightTo all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light;And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwellsStout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells.Surge leaping after surge, the fire roared onward red as blood,Till half of Hamburg lay engulfed beneath the eddying flood;For miles away, the fiery spray poured down its deadly rain,And back and forth the billows sucked, and paused, and burst again.From square to square with tiger leaps panted the lustful fire,The air to leeward shuddered with the gasps of its desire;And church and palace, which even now stood whelmed but to the knee,Lift their black roofs like breakers lone amid the whirling sea.Up in his tower old Herman sat and watched with quiet look;His soul had trusted God too long to be at last forsook;He could not fear, for surely God a pathway would unfoldThrough this red sea for faithful hearts, as once he did of old.But scarcely can he cross himself, or on his good saint call,Before the sacrilegious flood o'erleaped the churchyard wall;And, ere apaterhalf was said, mid smoke and crackling glare,His island tower scarce juts its head above the wide despair.Upon the peril's desperate peak his heart stood up sublime;His first thought was for God above, his next was for his chime;"Sing now and make your voices heard in hymns of praise," cried he,"As did the Israelites of old, safe walking through the sea!"Through this red sea our God hath made the pathway safe to shore;Our promised land stands full in sight; shout now as ne'er before!"And as the tower came crushing down, the bells, in clear accord,Pealed forth the grand old German hymn,—"All good souls, praise the Lord!"
THE SOWER.I saw a Sower walking slowAcross the earth, from east to west;His hair was white as mountain snow,His head drooped forward on his breast.With shrivelled hands he flung his seed,Nor ever turned to look behind;Of sight or sound he took no heed;It seemed he was both deaf and blind.His dim face showed no soul beneath,Yet in my heart I felt a stir,As if I looked upon the sheathThat once had clasped Excalibur.I heard, as still the seed he cast,How, crooning to himself, he sung,—"I sow again the holy Past,The happy days when I was young."Then all was wheat without a tare,Then all was righteous, fair, and true;And I am he whose thoughtful careShall plant the Old World in the New."The fruitful germs I scatter free,With busy hand, while all men sleep;In Europe now, from sea to sea,The nations bless me as they reap."Then I looked back along his path,And heard the clash of steel on steel,Where man faced man, in deadly wrath,While clanged the tocsin's hurrying peal.The sky with burning towns flared red,Nearer the noise of fighting rolled,And brothers' blood, by brothers shed,Crept, curdling, over pavements cold.Then marked I how each germ of truthWhich through the dotard's fingers ranWas mated with a dragon's toothWhence there sprang up an armed man.I shouted, but he could not hear;Made signs, but these he could not see;And still, without a doubt or fear,Broadcast he scattered anarchy.Long to my straining ears the blastBrought faintly back the words he sung:—"I sow again the holy Past,The happy days when I was young."
HUNGER AND COLD.Sisters two, all praise to you,With your faces pinched and blue;To the poor man you've been trueFrom of old:You can speak the keenest word,You are sure of being heard,From the point you're never stirred,Hunger and Cold!Let sleek statesmen temporize;Palsied are their shifts and liesWhen they meet your bloodshot eyes,Grim and bold;Policy you set at naught,In their traps you'll not be caught,You're too honest to be bought,Hunger and Cold!Bolt and bar the palace-door;While the mass of men are poor,Naked truth grows more and moreUncontrolled;You had never yet, I guess,Any praise for bashfulness,You can visit sans court-dress,Hunger and Cold!While the music fell and rose,And the dance reeled to its close,Where her round of costly woesFashion strolled,I beheld with shuddering fearWolves' eyes through the windows peer;Little dream they you are near,Hunger and Cold!When the toiler's heart you clutch,Conscience is not valued much,He recks not a bloody smutchOn his gold:Everything to you defers,You are potent reasoners,At your whisper Treason stirs,Hunger and Cold!Rude comparisons you draw,Words refuse to sate your maw,Your gaunt limbs the cobweb lawCannot hold:You 're not clogged with foolish pride,But can seize a right denied;Somehow God is on your side,Hunger and Cold!You respect no hoary wrongMore for having triumphed long;Its past victims, haggard throng,From the mouldYou unbury: swords and spearsWeaker are than poor men's tears,Weaker than your silent years,Hunger and Cold!Let them guard both hall and bower;Through the window you will glower,Patient till your reckoning hourShall be tolled:Cheeks are pale, but hands are red,Guiltless blood may chance be shed,But ye must and will be fed,Hunger and Cold!God has plans man must not spoil,Some were made to starve and toil,Some to share the wine and oil,We are told:Devil's theories are these,Stifling hope and love and peace,Framed your hideous lusts to please,Hunger and Cold!Scatter ashes on thy head,Tears of burning sorrow shed,Earth! and be by pity ledTo Love's fold;Ere they block the very doorWith lean corpses of the poor,And will hush for naught but gore,—Hunger and Cold!1844.
THE LANDLORD.What boot your houses and your lands?In spite of close-drawn deed and fence,Like water, 'twixt your cheated hands,They slip into the graveyard's sandsAnd mock your ownership's pretence.How shall you speak to urge your right,Choked with that soil for which you lustThe bit of clay, for whose delightYou grasp, is mortgaged, too; Death mightForeclose this very day in dust.Fence as you please, this plain poor man,Whose only fields are in his wit,Who shapes the world, as best he can,According to God's higher plan,Owns you and fences as is fit.Though yours the rents, his incomes waxBy right of eminent domain;From factory tall to woodman's axe,All things on earth must pay their tax,To feed his hungry heart and brain.He takes you from your easy-chair,And what he plans, that you must do.You sleep in down, eat dainty fare,—He mounts his crazy garret-stairAnd starves, the landlord over you.Feeding the clods your idlesse drains,You make more green six feet of soil;His fruitful word, like suns and rains,Partakes the seasons' bounteous pains,And toils to lighten human toil.Your lands, with force or cunning got,Shrink to the measure of the grave;But Death himself abridges notThe tenures of almighty thought,The titles of the wise and brave.
TO A PINE-TREE.Far up on Katahdin thou towerest,Purple-blue with the distance and vast;Like a cloud o'er the lowlands thou lowerest,That hangs poised on a lull in the blast,To its fall leaning awful.In the storm, like a prophet o'ermaddened,Thou singest and tossest thy branches;Thy heart with the terror is gladdened,Thou forebodest the dread avalanches,When whole mountains swoop valeward.In the calm thou o'erstretchest the valleysWith thine arms, as if blessings imploring,Like an old king led forth from his palace,When his people to battle are pouringFrom the city beneath him.To the lumberer asleep 'neath thy gloomingThou dost sing of wild billows in motion,Till he longs to be swung mid their boomingIn the tents of the Arabs of ocean,Whose finned isles are their cattle.For the gale snatches thee for his lyre,With mad hand crashing melody frantic,While he pours forth his mighty desireTo leap down on the eager Atlantic,Whose arms stretch to his playmate.The wild storm makes his lair in thy branches,Preying thence on the continent under;Like a lion, crouched close on his haunches,There awaiteth his leap the fierce thunder,Growling low with impatience.Spite of winter, thou keep'st thy green glory,Lusty father of Titans past number!The snow-flakes alone make thee hoary,Nestling close to thy branches in slumber,And thee mantling with silence.Thou alone know'st the splendor of winter,Mid thy snow-silvered, hushed precipices,Hearing crags of green ice groan and splinter,And then plunge down the muffled abyssesIn the quiet of midnight.Thou alone know'st the glory of summer,Gazing down on thy broad seas of forest,On thy subjects that send a proud murmurUp to thee, to their sachem, who towerestFrom thy bleak throne to heaven.
SI DESCENDERO IN INFERNUM, ADES.O, wandering dim on the extremest edgeOf God's bright providence, whose spirits sighDrearily in you, like the winter sedgeThat shivers o'er the dead pool stiff and dry,A thin, sad voice, when the bold wind roars byFrom the clear North of Duty,—Still by cracked arch and broken shaft I traceThat here was once a shrine and holy placeOf the supernal Beauty,—A child's play-altar reared of stones and moss,With wilted flowers for offering laid across,Mute recognition of the all-ruling Grace.How far are ye from the innocent, from thoseWhose hearts are as a little lane serene,Smooth-heaped from wall to wall with unbroke snows,Or in the summer blithe with lamb-cropped green,Save the one track, where naught more rude is seenThan the plump wain at evenBringing home four months' sunshine bound in sheaves!—How far are ye from those! yet who believesThat ye can shut out heaven?Your souls partake its influence, not in vainNor all unconscious, as that silent laneIts drift of noiseless apple-blooms receives.Looking within myself, I note how thinA plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate,Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;—In my own heart I find the worst man's mate,And see not dimly the smooth-hingèd gateThat opes to those abyssesWhere ye grope darkly,—ye who never knewOn your young hearts love's consecrating dew,Or felt a mother's kisses,Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled.Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this worldThe fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue!One band ye cannot break,—the force that clipsAnd grasps your circles to the central light;Yours is the prodigal comet's long ellipse,Self-exiled to the farthest verge of night;Yet strives with you no less that inward mightNo sin hath e'er imbruted;The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes;The Law brooks not to have its solitudesBy bigot feet polluted;—Yet they who watch your god-compelled returnMay see your happy perihelion burnWhere the calm sun his unfledged planets broods.
TO THE PAST.Wondrous and awful are thy silent halls,O kingdom of the past!There lie the bygone ages in their palls,Guarded by shadows vast,—There all is hushed and breathless,Save when some image of old error fallsEarth worshipped once as deathless.There sits drear Egypt, mid beleaguering sands,Half woman and half beast,The burnt-out torch within her mouldering handsThat once lit all the East;A dotard bleared and hoary,There Asser crouches o'er the blackened brandsOf Asia's long-quenched glory.Still as a city buried 'neath the sea,Thy courts and temples stand;Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestryOf saints and heroes grand,Thy phantasms grope and shiver,Or watch the loose shores crumbling silentlyInto Time's gnawing river.Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun,Of their old godhead lorn,Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun,Which they misdeem for morn;And yet the eternal sorrowIn their unmonarched eyes says day is doneWithout the hope of morrow.O realm of silence and of swart eclipse,The shapes that haunt thy gloomMake signs to us and move their withered lipsAcross the gulf of doom;Yet all their sound and motionBring no more freight to us than wraiths of shipsOn the mirage's ocean.And if sometimes a moaning wanderethFrom out thy desolate halls,If some grim shadow of thy living deathAcross our sunshine fallsAnd scares the world to error,The eternal life sends forth melodious breathTo chase the misty terror.Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deedsAre silent now in dust,Gone like a tremble of the huddling reedsBeneath some sudden gust;Thy forms and creeds have vanished,Tossed out to wither like unsightly weedsFrom the world's garden banished.Whatever of true life there was in theeLeaps in our age's veins;Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery,And shake thine idle chains;—To thee thy dross is clinging,For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see,Thy poets still are singing.Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care,Float the green Fortunate Isles,Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and shareOur martyrdoms and toils;The present moves attendedWith all of brave and excellent and fairThat made the old time splendid.
TO THE FUTURE.O Land of Promise! from what Pisgah's heightCan I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers,Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight,Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers?Gazing upon the sunset's high-heaped gold,Its crags of opal and of chrysolite,Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfoldStill brightening abysses,And blazing precipices,Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven,Sometimes a glimpse is givenOf thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted blisses.O Land of Quiet! to thy shore the surfOf the perturbèd Present rolls and sleeps;Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turfAnd lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps,As to a mother's, the o'erwearied heart,Hearing far off and dim the toiling mart,The hurrying feet, the curses without number,And, circled with the glow Elysian,Of thine exulting vision,Out of its very cares wooes charms for peace and slumber.To thee the Earth lifts up her fettered handsAnd cries for vengeance; with a pitying smileThou blessest her, and she forgets her bands,And her old woe-worn face a little whileGrows young and noble; unto thee the OppressorLooks, and is dumb with awe;The eternal law,Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser,Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding,And he can see the grim-eyed DoomFrom out the trembling gloomIts silent-footed steeds toward his palace goading.What promises hast thou for Poets' eyes,Aweary of the turmoil and the wrong!To all their hopes what overjoyed replies!What undreamed ecstasies for blissful song!Thy happy plains no war-trump's brawling clangorDisturbs, and fools the poor to hate the poor;The humble glares not on the high with anger;Love leaves no grudge at less, no greed for more;In vain strives Self the god-like sense to smother;From the soul's deepsIt throbs and leaps;The noble 'neath foul rags beholds his long-lost brother.To thee the Martyr looketh, and his firesUnlock their fangs and leave his spirit free;To thee the Poet mid his toil aspires,And grief and hunger climb about his knee,Welcome as children; thou upholdestThe lone Inventor by his demon haunted;The Prophet cries to thee when hearts are coldest,And, gazing o'er the midnight's bleak abyss,Sees the drowsed soul awaken at thy kiss,And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted.Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindlyThe guilty thinks it pity; taught by thee,Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith blindlyTheir own souls they were scarring; conquerors seeWith horror in their hands the accursed spearThat tore the meek One's side on Calvary,And from their trophies shrink with ghastly fear;Thou, too, art the Forgiver,The beauty of man's soul to man revealing;The arrows from thy quiverPierce Error's guilty heart, but only pierce for healing.O, whither, whither, glory-wingèd dreams,From out Life's sweat and turmoil would ye bear me?Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams,—This agony of hopeless contrast spare me!Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night!He is a coward, who would borrowA charm against the present sorrowFrom the vague Future's promise of delight:As life's alarums nearer roll,The ancestral buckler calls,Self-clanging from the wallsIn the high temple of the soul;Where are most sorrows, there the poet's sphere is,To feed the soul with patience,To heal its desolationsWith words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies.
HEBE.I saw the twinkle of white feet,I saw the flash of robes descending;Before her ran an influence fleet,That bowed my heart like barley bending.As, in bare fields, the searching beesPilot to blooms beyond our finding,It led me on, by sweet degrees,Joy's simple honey-cells unbinding.Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates;With nearer love the sky leaned o'er me;The long-sought Secret's golden gatesOn musical hinges swung before me.I saw the brimmed bowl in her graspThrilling with godhood; like a loverI sprang the proffered life to clasp;—The beaker fell; the luck was over.The Earth has drunk the vintage up;What boots it patch the goblet's splinters?Can Summer fill the icy cup,Whose treacherous crystal is but Winter's?O spendthrift, haste! await the Gods;Their nectar crowns the lips of Patience;Haste scatters on unthankful sodsThe immortal gift in vain libations.Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,And shuns the hands would seize upon her,Follow thy life, and she will sueTo pour for thee the cup of honor.
THE SEARCH.I went to seek for Christ,And Nature seemed so fairThat first the woods and fields my youth enticed,And I was sure to find him there:The temple I forsook,And to the solitudeAllegiance paid; but winter came and shookThe crown and purple from my wood;His snows, like desert sands, with scornful drift,Besieged the columned aisle and palace-gate;My Thebes, cut deep with many a solemn rift,But epitaphed her own sepulchred state:Then I remembered whom I went to seek,And blessed blunt Winter for his counsel bleak.Back to the world I turned,For Christ, I said, is king;So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned,As far beneath his sojourning:Mid power and wealth I sought,But found no trace of him,And all the costly offerings I had broughtWith sudden rust and mould grew dim:I found his tomb, indeed, where, by their laws,All must on stated days themselves imprison,Mocking with bread a dead creed's grinning jaws,Witless how long the life had thence arisen;Due sacrifice to this they set apart,Prizing it more than Christ's own living heart.So from my feet the dustOf the proud World I shook;Then came dear Love and shared with me his crust,And half my sorrow's burden took.After the World's soft bed,Its rich and dainty fare,Like down seemed Love's coarse pillow to my head,His cheap food seemed as manna rare;Fresh-trodden prints of bare and bleeding feet,Turned to the heedless city whence I came,Hard by I saw, and springs of worship sweetGushed from my cleft heart smitten by the same;Love looked me in the face and spake no words,But straight I knew those foot-prints were the Lord's.I followed where they ledAnd in a hovel rude,With naught to fence the weather from his head,The King I sought for meekly stoodA naked, hungry childClung round his gracious knee,And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiledTo bless the smile that set him free;New miracles I saw his presence do,—No more I knew the hovel bare and poor,The gathered chips into a woodpile grew,The broken morsel swelled to goodly store;I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek,His throne is with the outcast and the weak.
THE PRESENT CRISIS.When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breastRuns a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climbTo the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublimeOf a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro;At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies with GodIn hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flush of right or wrong;Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frameThrough its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong,And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throngTroops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea;Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cryOf those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly;Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but recordOne death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown,Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."Slavery, the earthborn Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;—Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just;Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone,While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam inclineTo the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track,Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learnedOne new word of that grandCredowhich in prophet-hearts hath burnedSince the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands,On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe returnTo glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slavesOf a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves,Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;—Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make Plymouth rock sublime?They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's;But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free,Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits fleeThe rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires;Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay,From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps awayTo light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.December, 1845.
AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE.What visionary tints the year puts on,When falling leaves falter through motionless airOr numbly cling and shiver to be gone!How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fillsThe bowl between me and those distant hills,And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!No more the landscape holds its wealth apart.Making me poorer in my poverty,But mingles with my senses and my heart;My own projected spirit seems to meIn her own reverie the world to steep;'Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep,Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill, and tree.How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms,Each into each, the hazy distances!The softened season all the landscape charms;Those hills, my native village that embay,In waves of dreamier purple roll away,And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.Far distant sounds the hidden chickadeeClose at my side; far distant sound the leaves;The fields seem fields of dream, where MemoryWanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheavesOf wheat and barley wavered in the eyeOf Boaz as the maiden's glow went by,So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates,Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits;Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails;Silently overhead the henhawk sails,With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.The sobered robin, hunger-silent now,Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer;The squirrel on the shingly shagbark's bough,Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear,Then drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound,Whisks to his winding fastness underground;The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadowsDrowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's callCreeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;The single crow a single caw lets fall;And all around me every bush and treeSays Autumn 's here, and Winter soon will beWho snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.The birch, most shy and lady-like of trees,Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,And hints at her foregone gentilitiesWith some saved relics of her wealth of leaves;The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on,Glares red as blood across the sinking sun,As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt,Who, mid some council of the sad-garbed whites,Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt,With distant eye broods over other sights,Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace,The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace,And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost,And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry,After the first betrayal of the frost,Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky;The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold,To the faint Summer, beggared now and old,Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring eye.The ash her purple drops forgivinglyAnd sadly, breaking not the general hush;The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea,Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush;All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blazeOf bushes low, as when, on cloudy days,Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone,Where vines, and weeds, and scrub-oaks intertwineSafe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stoneIs massed to one soft gray by lichens fine,The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weavesA prickly network of ensanguined leaves;Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary,Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's foot,Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye,Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot,The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires.Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires;In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.Below, the Charles—a stripe of nether sky,Now hid by rounded apple-trees between,Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by,Now flickering golden through a woodland screen,Then spreading out at his next turn beyond,A silver circle like an inland pond—Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sightWho cannot in their various incomes share,From every season drawn, of shade and light,Who sees in them but levels brown and bare;Each change of storm or sunshine scatters freeOn them its largesse of variety,For nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green,O'er which the light winds run with glimmering feet;Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen,There, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet;And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd,As if the silent shadow of a cloudHung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.All round, upon the river's slippery edge,Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide,Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge;Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide,Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun,And the stiff banks in eddies melt and runOf dimpling light, and with the current seem to glide.In Summer 'tis a blithesome sight to see,As, step by step, with measured swing, they pass,The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee,Their sharp scythes panting through the thick-set grass;Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring,Their nooning take, while one begins to singA stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky of brass.Meanwhile the devil-may-care, the bobolink,Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stopsJust ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink,And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops,A decorous bird of business, who providesFor his brown mate and fledglings six besides,And looks from right to left, a farmer mid his crops.Another change subdues them in the Fall,But saddens not; they still show merrier tints,Though sober russet seems to cover all;When the first sunshine through their dew-drops glints,Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across,Redeems with rarer hues the season's loss,As Dawn's feet there had touched and left their rosy prints.Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest,Lean o'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill,While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west,Glow opposite;—the marshes drink their fillAnd swoon with purple veins, then slowly fadeThrough pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade,Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simond's darkening hill.Later, and yet ere Winter wholly shuts,Ere through the first dry snow the runner grates,And the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts,While firmer ice the eager boy awaits,Trying each buckle and strap beside the fire,And until bed-time plays with his desire,Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates;—Then, every morn, the river's banks shine brightWith smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail,By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night,'Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail,Giving a pretty emblem of the dayWhen guiltier arms in light shall melt away,And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war's cramping mail.And now those waterfalls the ebbing riverTwice every day creates on either sideTinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they shiverIn grass-arched channels to the sun denied;High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow,The silvered flats gleam frostily below,Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the glassy tide.But, crowned in turn by vying seasons three,Their winter halo hath a fuller ring;This glory seems to rest immovably,—The others were too fleet and vanishing;When the hid tide is at its highest flow,O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snowWith brooding fulness awes and hushes everything.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 plainsDrives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt,And the roused Charles remembers in his veinsOld Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost,That tyrannous silence on the shores is tostIn dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns.Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device,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 stiffDown crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff,Or when the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there.But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenesTo that whose pastoral calm before me lies:Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes;The early evening with her misty dyesSmooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh,Relieves the distant with her cooler sky,And tones the landscape down, and 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 and stiff the Muses' factories;—How with my life knit up is every well-known scene!Flow on, dear river! not alone you flowTo outward sight, and through your marshes wind;Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago,Your twin flows silent through my world of mind:Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray!Before my inner sight ye stretch away,And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.Beyond that 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,Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.Virgilium vidi tantum,—I have seenBut 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 fameThat thither many times the Painter came;—One elm yet bears his name, a feathery 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 seeOust the black smithy from its chestnut tree,And that hewn down, perhaps, the beehive green and vast.How many times, prouder than king on throne,Loosed from the village school-dame's A's and B's,Panting have I the creaky bellows blown,And watched the pent volcano's red increase,Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought downBy that hard arm voluminous and brown,From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.Dear native town! whose choking elms each yearWith 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,The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away,So palpable, I've seen those unshorn few,The six old willows at the causey's end,(Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew,)Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send,Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn thread,Where streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red,Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird's flashes blend.Yes, dearer far thy dust than all that e'er,Beneath the awarded crown of victory,Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer;Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three,Yetcollegisse juvat, I am gladThat here what colleging was mine I had,—It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!Nearer art thou than simply native earth,My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie;A closer claim thy soil may well put forth,Something of kindred more than sympathy;For in thy bounds I reverently laid awayThat blinding anguish of forsaken clay,That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,That portion of my life more choice to me(Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole)Than all the imperfect residue can be;—The Artist saw his statue of the soulWas perfect; so, with one regretful stroke,The earthen model into fragments broke,And without her the impoverished seasons roll.