THE GROWTH OF THE LEGEND.A FRAGMENT.A legend that grew in the forest's hushSlowly as tear-drops gather and gush,When a word some poet chanced to sayAges ago, in his careless way,Brings our youth back to us out of its shroudClearly as under yon thunder-cloudI see that white sea-gull. It grew and grew,From the pine-trees gathering a sombre hue,Till it seems a mere murmur out of the vastNorwegian forests of the past;And it grew itself like a true Northern pine,First a little slender line,Like a mermaid's green eyelash, and then anonA stem that a tower might rest upon,Standing spear-straight in the waist-deep moss,Its bony roots clutching around and across,As if they would tear up earth's heart in their graspEre the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp;Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine,To shrunk snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine,Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor,Hearing waves moan again on the perilous shoreOf Vinland, perhaps, while their prow groped its way'Twixt the frothy gnashed tusks of some ship-crunching bay.So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall,As the Gipsy 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;'Twas a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there,A true part of the landscape as sea, land, and air;For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it wasTo force up these wild births of the woods under glass,And so, if 'tis 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 sea-like and northern through every line,And the verses should hang, self-sustained and free,Round the vibrating stem of the melody,Like the lithe sun-steeped limbs of the parent tree.Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what foodFor their grim roots is left when the thousand-yeared wood—The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches springLight, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wingFrom Michael's white shoulder—is hewn and defacedBy iconoclast axes in desperate waste,And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long,Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song?Then the legends go with them,—even yet on the seaA wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree,And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the coreWith the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never let in,Since the day of creation, the light and the dinOf manifold life, but has safely conveyedFrom the midnight primeval its armful of shade,And has kept the weird Past with its sagas aliveMid the hum and the stir of To-day's busy hive,There the legend takes root in the age-gathered gloom,And its murmurous boughs for their tossing find room.Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goesGroping down to the sea 'neath his mountainous snows;Where the lake's frore Sahara of never-tracked white,When the crack shoots across it, complains to the nightWith 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 which throwTheir own threatening shadows far round o'er the snow,When the wolf howls aloof, and the wavering glareFlashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear,When the wood's huge recesses, half-lighted, supplyA canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try,Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not downThrough the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town,But skulk in the depths of the measureless woodMid 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 Man crouch backTo the shroud of the tree-trunk's invincible black;—There the old shapes crowd thick round the pine-shadowed camp,Which shun the keen gleam of the scholarly lamp,And the seed of the legend finds true Norland ground,While the border-tale's told and the canteen flits round.
A CONTRAST.Thy love thou sentest oft to me,And still as oft I thrust it back;Thy messengers I could not seeIn those who everything did lack,—The poor,the outcast, and the black.Pride held his hand before mine eyes,The world with flattery stuffed mine ears;I looked to see a monarch's guise,Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years,Poor, naked, fettered, full of tears.Yet, when I sent my love to thee,Thou with a smile didst take it in,And entertain'dst it royally,Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin,And leprous with the taint of sin.Now every day thy love I meet,As o'er the earth it wanders wide,With weary step and bleeding feet,Still knocking at the heart of prideAnd offering grace, though still denied.
EXTREME UNCTION.Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would beAlone with the consoler, Death;Far sadder eyes than thine will seeThis crumbling clay yield up its breath;These shrivelled hands have deeper stainsThan holy oil can cleanse away,—Hands that have plucked the world's coarse gainsAs erst they plucked the flowers of May.Call, if thou canst, to these gray eyesSome faith from youth's traditions wrung;This fruitless husk which dustward driesHas been a heart once, has been young;On this bowed head the awful PastOnce laid its consecrating hands;The Future in its purpose vastPaused, waiting my supreme commands.But look! whose shadows block the door?Who are those two that stand aloof?See! on my hands this freshening goreWrites 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?"I have been innocent; God knowsWhen first this wasted life began,Not grape with grape more kindly grows,Than I with every brother-man:Now here I gasp; what lose my kind,When this fast-ebbing breath shall part?What bands of love and service bindThis being to the world's sad heart?Christ still was wandering o'er the earth,Without a place to lay his head;He found free welcome at my hearth,He shared my cup and broke my bread:Now, when I hear those steps sublime,That bring the other world to this,My snake-turned nature, sunk in slime,Starts sideway with defiant hiss.Upon the hour when I was born,God said, "Another man shall be,"And the great Maker did not scornOut of himself to fashion me;He sunned me with his ripening looks,And Heaven's rich instincts in me grew,As effortless as woodland nooksSend violets up and paint them blue.Yes, I who now, with angry tears,Am exiled back to brutish clod,Have borne unquenched for fourscore yearsA spark of the eternal God;And to what end? How yield I backThe trust for such high uses given?Heaven's light hath but revealed a trackWhereby to crawl away from heaven.Men think it is an awful sightTo see a soul just set adriftOn that drear voyage from whose nightThe ominous shadows never lift;But 'tis more awful to beholdA helpless infant, newly born,Whose little hands unconscious holdThe keys of darkness and of morn.Mine held them once; I flung awayThose keys that might have open setThe golden sluices of the day,But clutch the keys of darkness yet;—I hear the reapers singing goInto God's harvest; I, that mightWith them have chosen, here belowGrope shuddering at the gates of night.O glorious Youth, that once wast mine!O high ideal! all in vainYe enter at this ruined shrineWhence worship ne'er shall rise again,The bat and owl inhabit here,The snake nests in the altar-stone,The sacred vessels moulder near,The image of the God is gone.
THE OAK.What gnarlèd stretch, what depth of shade, is his!There needs no crown to mark the forest's king;How in his leaves outshines full summer's bliss!Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring,Which he with such benignant royaltyAccepts, as overpayeth what is lent;All nature seems his vassal proud to be,And cunning only for his ornament.How towers he, too, amid the billowed snows,An unquelled exile from the summer's throne,Whose plain, uncinctured front more kingly shows,Now that the obscuring courtier leaves are flown.His boughs make music of the winter air,Jewelled with sleet, like some cathedral frontWhere clinging snow-flakes with quaint art repairThe dints and furrows of time's envious brunt.How doth his patient strength the rude March windPersuade to seem glad breaths of summer breeze,And win the soil that fain would be unkind,To swell his revenues with proud increase!He is the gem; and all the landscape wide(So doth his grandeur isolate the sense)Seems but the setting, worthless all beside,An empty socket, were he fallen thence.So, from off converse with life's wintry gales,Should man learn how to clasp with tougher rootsThe inspiring earth;—how otherwise availsThe leaf-creating sap that sunward shoots?So every year that falls with noiseless flakeShould fill old scars upon the stormward side,And make hoar age revered for age's sake,Not for traditions of youth's leafy pride.So from the pinched soil of a churlish fate,True hearts compel the sap of sturdier growth,So between earth and heaven stand simply great,That these shall seem but their attendants both;For nature's forces with obedient zealWait on the rooted faith and oaken will;As quickly the pretender's cheat they feel,And turn mad Pucks to flout and mock him still.Lord! all thy works are lessons,—each containsSome emblem of man's all-containing soul;Shall he make fruitless all thy glorious pains,Delving within thy grace an eyeless mole?Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove,Cause me some message of thy truth to bring,Speak but a word through me, nor let thy loveAmong my boughs disdain to perch and sing.
AMBROSE.Never, surely, was holier manThan Ambrose, since the world began;With diet spare and raiment thin,He shielded himself from the father of sin;With bed of iron and scourgings oft,His heart to God's hand as wax made soft.Through earnest prayer and watchings longHe sought to know 'twixt right and wrong,Much wrestling with the blessed WordTo make it yield the sense of the Lord,That he might build a storm-proof creedTo fold the flock in at their need.At last he builded a perfect faith,Fenced round about withThe Lord thus saith;To himself he fitted the doorway's size,Meted the light to the need of his eyes,And knew, by a sure and inward sign,That the work of his fingers was divine.Then Ambrose said, "All those shall dieThe eternal death who believe not as I;"And some were boiled, some burned in fire,Some sawn in twain, that his heart's desire,For the good of men's souls, might be satisfied,By the drawing of all to the righteous side.One day, as Ambrose was seeking the truthIn his lonely walk, he saw a youthResting himself in the shade of a tree;It had never been given him to seeSo shining a face, and the good man thought'T were pity he should not believe as he ought.So he set himself by the young man's side,And the state of his soul with questions tried;But the heart of the stranger was hardened indeedNor received the stamp of the one true creed,And the spirit of Ambrose waxed sore to findSuch face the porch of so narrow a mind."As each beholds in cloud and fireThe shape that answers his own desire,So each," said the youth, "in the Law shall findThe figure and features of his mind;And to each in his mercy hath God allowedHis several pillar of fire and cloud."The soul of Ambrose burned with zealAnd holy wrath for the young man's weal:"Believest thou then, most wretched youth,"Cried he, "a dividual essence in Truth?I fear me thy heart is too cramped with sinTo take the Lord in his glory in."Now there bubbled beside them where they stood,A fountain of waters sweet and good;The youth to the streamlet's brink drew nearSaying, "Ambrose, thou maker of creeds, look here!"Six vases of crystal then he took,And set them along the edge of the brook."As into these vessels the water I pour,There shall one hold less, another more,And the water unchanged, in every case,Shall put on the figure of the vase;O thou, who wouldst unity make through strife,Canst thou fit this sign to the Water of Life?"When Ambrose looked up, he stood alone,The youth and the stream and the vases were gone;But he knew, by a sense of humbled grace,He had talked with an angel face to face,And felt his heart change inwardly,As he fell on his knees beneath the tree.
ABOVE AND BELOW.I.O dwellers in the valley-land,Who in deep twilight grope and cower,Till the slow mountain's dial-handShortens to noon's triumphal hour,—While ye sit idle, do ye thinkThe Lord's great work sits idle too?That light dare not o'erleap the brinkOf morn, because 'tis dark with you?Though yet your valleys skulk in night,In God's ripe fields the day is cried,And reapers with their sickles bright,Troop, singing, down the mountain side.Come up, and feel what health there isIn the frank Dawn's delighted eyes,As, bending with a pitying kiss,The night-shed tears of Earth she dries!The Lord wants reapers: O, mount up,Before night comes, and says,—"Too late!"Stay not for taking scrip or cup,The Master hungers while ye wait;'Tis from these heights alone your eyesThe advancing spears of day can see,Which o'er the eastern hill-tops rise,To break your long captivity.II.Lone watcher on the mountain-height!It is right precious to beholdThe first long surf of climbing lightFlood all the thirsty east with gold;But we, who in the shadow sit,Know also when the day is nigh,Seeing thy shining forehead litWith his inspiring prophecy.Thou hast thine office; we have ours;God lacks not early service here,But what are thine eleventh hoursHe counts with us for morning cheerOur day, for Him, is long enough,And when he giveth work to do,The bruisèd reed is amply toughTo pierce the shield of error through.But not the less do thou aspireLight's earlier messages to preach;Keep back no syllable of fire,—Plunge deep the rowels of thy speech.Yet God deems not thine aëried sightMore worthy than our twilight dim,—For meek Obedience, too, is Light,And following that is finding Him.
THE CAPTIVE.It was past the hour of trysting,But she lingered for him still;Like a child, the eager streamletLeaped and laughed adown the hill,Happy to be free at twilightFrom its toiling at the mill.Then the great moon on a suddenOminous, and red as blood,Startling as a new creation,O'er the eastern hill-top stood,Casting deep and deeper shadowsThrough the mystery of the wood.Dread closed huge and vague about her,And her thoughts turned fearfullyTo her heart, if there some shelterFrom the silence there might be,Like bare cedars leaning inlandFrom the blighting of the sea.Yet he came not, and the stillnessDampened round her like a tomb;She could feel cold eyes of spiritsLooking on her through the gloom,She could hear the groping footstepsOf some blind, gigantic doom.Suddenly the silence waveredLike a light mist in the wind,For a voice broke gently through it,Felt like sunshine by the blind,And the dread, like mist in sunshine,Furled serenely from her mind."Once my love, my love forever,—Flesh or spirit still the same;If I missed the hour of trysting,Do not think my faith to blame.I, alas, was made a captive,As from Holy Land I came."On a green spot in the desert,Gleaming like an emerald star,Where a palm-tree, in lone silence,Yearning for its mate afar,Droops above a silver runnel,Slender as a scimitar,—"There thou'lt find the humble posternTo the castle of my foe;If thy love burn clear and faithful,Strike the gateway, green and low,Ask to enter, and the warderSurely will not say thee no."Slept again the aspen silence,But her loneliness was o'er;Round her heart a motherly patienceWrapt its arms for evermore;From her soul ebbed back the sorrow,Leaving smooth the golden shore.Donned she now the pilgrim scallop,Took the pilgrim staff in hand;Like a cloud-shade, flitting eastward,Wandered she o'er sea and land;And her footsteps in the desertFell like cool rain on the sand.Soon, beneath the palm-tree's shadow,Knelt she at the postern low;And thereat she knocketh gently,Fearing much the warder's no;All her heart stood still and listened,As the door swung backward slow.There she saw no surly warderWith an eye like bolt and bar;Through her soul a sense of musicThrobbed,—and, like a guardian Lar,On the threshold stood an angel,Bright and silent as a star.Fairest seemed he of God's seraphs,And her spirit, lily-wise,Blossomed when he turned upon herThe deep welcome of his eyes,Sending upward to that sunlightAll its dew for sacrifice.Then she heard a voice come onwardSinging with a rapture new,As Eve heard the songs in Eden,Dropping earthward with the dew;Well she knew the happy singer,Well the happy song she knew.Forward leaped she o'er the threshold,Eager as a glancing surf;Fell from her the spirit's languor,Fell from her the body's scurf;—'Neath the palm next day some ArabsFound a corpse upon the turf.
THE BIRCH-TREE.Rippling through thy branches goes the sunshine,Among thy leaves that palpitate forever;Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had prisoned,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,Holds up its leaves in happy, happy silence,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.Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet,Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad,Dripping about thy slim white stem, whose shadowSlopes quivering down the water's dusky quiet,Thou shrink'st as on her bath's edge would some startled Dryad.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,And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weepingAbove her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping.Thou art to me like my beloved maiden,So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences;Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leafletsSprinkle their gathered sunshine o'er my senses,And Nature gives me all her summer confidences.Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble,Thou sympathizest still; wild and unquiet,I fling me down; thy ripple, like a river,Flows valleyward, where calmness is, and by itMy heart is floated down into the land of quiet.
AN INTERVIEW WITH MILES STANDISH.I sat one evening in my room,In that sweet hour of twilightWhen blended thoughts, half light, half gloom,Throng through the spirit's skylight;The flames by fits curled round the bars,Or up the chimney crinkled,While embers dropped like falling stars,And in the ashes tinkled.I sat and mused; the fire burned low,And, o'er my senses stealing,Crept something of the ruddy glowThat bloomed on wall and ceiling;My pictures (they are very few,—The heads of ancient wise men)Smoothed down their knotted fronts, and grewAs rosy as excisemen.My antique high-backed Spanish chairFelt thrills through wood and leather,That had been strangers since whilere,Mid Andalusian heather,The oak that made its sturdy frameHis happy arms stretched overThe ox whose fortunate hide becameThe bottom's polished cover.It came out in that famous barkThat brought our sires intrepid,Capacious as another arkFor furniture decrepit;—For, as that saved of bird and beastA pair for propagation,So has the seed of these increasedAnd furnished half the nation.Kings sit, they say, in slippery seats;But those slant precipicesOf ice the northern voyager meetsLess slippery are than this is;To cling therein would pass the witOf royal man or woman,And whatsoe'er can stay in itIs more or less than human.I offer to all bores this perch,Dear well-intentioned peopleWith heads as void as week-day church,Tongues longer than the steeple;To folks with missions, whose gaunt eyesSee golden ages rising,—Salt of the earth! in what queer GuysThou'rt fond of crystallizing!My wonder, then, was not unmixedWith merciful suggestion,When, as my roving eyes grew fixedUpon the chair in question,I saw its trembling arms encloseA figure grim and rusty,Whose doublet plain and plainer hoseWere something worn and dusty.Now even such men as Nature formsMerely to fill the street with,Once turned to ghosts by hungry worms,Are serious things to meet with;Your penitent spirits are no jokes,And, though I'm not averse toA quiet shade, even they are folksOne cares not to speak first to.Who knows, thought I, but he has come,By Charon kindly ferried,To tell me of a mighty sumBehind my wainscot buried?There is a buccaneerish airAbout that garb outlandish——Just then the ghost drew up his chairAnd said "My name is Standish."I come from Plymouth, deadly boredWith toasts, and songs, and speeches,As long and flat as my old sword,As threadbare as my breeches:Theyunderstand us Pilgrims! they,Smooth men with rosy faces,Strength's knots and gnarls all pared away,And varnish in their places!"We had some toughness in our grain,The eye to rightly see us isNot just the one that lights the brainOf drawing-room Tyrtæuses:Theytalk about their Pilgrim blood,Their birthright high and holy!—A mountain-stream that ends in mudMethinks is melancholy."He had stiff knees, the Puritan,That were not good at bending;The homespun dignity of manHe 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."These loud ancestral boasts of yours,How can they else than vex us?Where were your dinner oratorsWhen slavery grasped at Texas?Dumb on his knees was every oneThat now is bold as Cæsar,—Mere pegs to hang an office onSuch stalwart men as these are.""Good Sir," I said, "you seem much stirredThe sacred compromises——""Now God confound the dastard word!My gall thereat arises:Northward it hath this sense alone,That you, your conscience blinding,Shall bow your fool's nose to the stone,When slavery feels like grinding."'Tis shame to see such painted sticksIn Vane's and Winthrop's places,To see your spirit of Seventy-sixDrag humbly in the traces,With slavery's lash upon her back,And herds of office-holdersTo shout applause, as, with a crack,It peels her patient shoulders."Weforefathers to such a rout!—No, by my faith in God's word!"Half rose the ghost, and half drew outThe ghost of his old broadsword,Then thrust it slowly back again,And said, with reverent gesture,"No, Freedom, no! blood should not stainThe hem of thy white vesture."I feel the soul in me draw nearThe mount of prophesying;In this bleak wilderness I hearA John the Baptist crying;Far in the east I see upleapThe streaks of first forewarning,And they who sowed the light shall reapThe golden sheaves of morning."Child of our travail and our woe,Light in our day of sorrow,Through my rapt spirit I foreknowThe glory of thy morrow;I hear great steps, that through the shadeDraw nigher still and nigher,And voices call like that which badeThe prophet come up higher."I looked, no form mine eyes could find,I heard the red cock crowing,And through my window-chinks the windA dismal tune was blowing;Thought I, My neighbor BuckinghamHath somewhat in him gritty,Some Pilgrim-stuff that hates all sham,And he will print my ditty.
ON THE CAPTURE OF CERTAIN FUGITIVE SLAVES NEAR WASHINGTON.Look on who will in apathy, and stifle they who can,The sympathies, the hopes, the words, that make man truly man;Let those whose hearts are dungeoned up with interest or with easeConsent to hear with quiet pulse of loathsome deeds like these!I first drew in New England's air, and from her hardy breastSucked in the tyrant-hating milk that will not let me rest;And if my words seem treason to the dullard and the tame,'Tis but my Bay-State dialect,—our fathers spake the same!Shame on the costly mockery of piling stone on stoneTo those who won our liberty, the heroes dead and gone,While we look coldly on, and see law-shielded ruffians slayThe men who fain would win their own, the heroes of to-day!Are we pledged to craven silence? O fling it to the wind,The parchment wall that bars us from the least of human kind,—That makes us cringe and temporize, and dumbly stand at rest,While Pity's burning flood of words is red-hot in the breast!Though we break our fathers' promise, we have nobler duties first;The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed;Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod,Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, more,To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit's core;—Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so, but thenBefore Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.He's true to God who's true to man; wherever wrong is done,To the humblest and the weakest, neath the all-beholding sun,That wrong is also done to us; and they are slaves most base,Whose love of right is for themselves, and not for all their race.God works for all. Ye cannot hem the hope of being freeWith parallels of latitude, with mountain-range or sea.Put golden padlocks on Truth's lips, be callous as ye will,From soul to soul o'er all the world, leaps one electric thrill.Chain down your slaves with ignorance, ye cannot keep apart,With all your craft of tyranny, the human heart from heart:When first the Pilgrims landed on the Bay-State's iron shore,The word went forth that slavery should one day be no more.Out from the land of bondage 'tis decreed our slaves shall go,And signs to us are offered, as erst to Pharaoh;If we are blind, their exodus, like Israel's of yore,Through a Red Sea is doomed to be, whose surges are of gore.'Tis ours to save our brethren, with peace and love to winTheir darkened hearts from error, ere they harden it to sin;But if before his duty man with listless spirit stands,Ere long the Great Avenger takes the work from out his hands.
TO THE DANDELION.Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way,Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,First pledge of blithesome May,Which children pluck, and, full of pride, uphold,High-hearted buccaneers, o'erjoyed that theyAn Eldorado in the grass have found,Which not the rich earth's ample roundMay match in wealth,—thou art more dear to meThan all the prouder summer-blooms may be.Gold such as thine ne'er drew the Spanish prowThrough the primeval hush of Indian seas,Nor wrinkled the lean browOf age, to rob the lover's heart of ease;'Tis the spring's largess, which she scatters nowTo rich and poor alike, with lavish hand,Though most hearts never understandTo take it at God's value, but pass byThe offered wealth with unrewarded eye.Thou art my tropics and mine Italy;To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime;The eyes thou givest meAre in the heart, and heed not space or time:Not in mid June the golden-cuirassed beeFeels a more summer-like warm ravishmentIn the white lily's breezy tent,His fragrant Sybaris, than I, when firstFrom the dark green thy yellow circles burst.Then think I of deep shadows on the grass,—Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze,Where, as the breezes pass,The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways,—Of leaves that slumber in a cloudy mass,Or whiten in the wind,—of waters blueThat from the distance sparkle throughSome woodland gap,—and of a sky above,Where one white cloud like a stray lamb doth move.My childhood's earliest thoughts are linked with thee;The sight of thee calls back the robin's song,Who, from the dark old treeBeside the door, sang clearly all day long,And I, secure in childish piety,Listened as if I heard an angel singWith news from heaven, which he could bringFresh every day to my untainted ears,When birds and flowers and I were happy peers.How like a prodigal doth nature seem,When thou, for all thy gold, so common art!Thou teachest me to deemMore sacredly of every human heart,Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleamOf heaven, and could some wondrous secret showDid we but pay the love we owe,And with a child's undoubting wisdom lookOn all these living pages of God's book.