Dear native town! whose choking elms each year

With eddying dust before their time turn gray,

Pining for rain, to me thydust 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 thro' 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 rib-
boned parchments three,
Yet collegisse juvat, I am glad
That 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 away

That blinding anguish of forsaken clay,

That title I seemed to have in earth

and sea and sky,

Till they straightened and let their staves fell to the floor, Hearing waves moan again on the perilous shore

Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow groped its way 'Twixt the frothed gnashing tusks of some ship-crunching bay.

So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall,

As the Gypsy 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,

True part of the landscape as sea, land, and air;

For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was

To force these wild births of the woods under glass,

And so, if 'tis told as it should be told,

Though 'twere sung under Venice's moonlight of gold,

You would hear the old voice of its mother, the pine,

Murmur sealike and northern

through every line,

And the verses should grow, selfsustained and free,

Round the vibrating stem of the melody,

Like the lithe moonlit limbs of the parent tree.

Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food

For their grim roots is left when the thousand-yeared wood, The dim-aisled cathedral whose tall arches spring

Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing

From Michael's white shoulder, is hewn and defaced

By iconoclast axes in desperate waste,

And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long,

Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song?

even yet on the sea

A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree,

And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the core

With 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 din

Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed

From the midnight primeval its armful of shade,

And has kept the weird Past with its sagas alive

'Mid the hum and the stir of Today's busy hive,

There the legend takes root in the

age-gathered gloom, And its murmurous boughs for their sagas find room.

Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goes Groping 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 night With 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 that throw Their own threatening shadows far

round o'er the snow, When the wolf howls aloof, and

the wavering glare

Flashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear, When the wood's huge recesses, half-lighted, supply

A canvas where Fancy her mad

brush may try, Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not down Through the right-angled streets of

the brisk, whitewashed town,

measureless wood

'Mid 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 back

To 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 see

In 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 pride

And offering grace, though still denied.

The golden sluices of the day,

But clutch the keys of darkness yet;

I hear the reapers singing go

Into God's harvest; I, that might With them have chosen, here below

Grope shuddering at the gates of night.

O glorious Youth, that once wast mine!

O high Ideal! all in vain Ye enter at this ruined shrine Whence worship ne'er shall rise again;

The bat and owl inhabit here,

The snake nests in the altarstone,

The sacred vessels moulder near, The image of the God is gone.

Accepts, 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 front

Where clinging snow-flakes with quaint art repair

The dints and furrows of time's envious brunt.

How doth his patient strength the rude March wind

Persuade 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 oft converse with life's wintry gales,

Should man learn how to clasp with tougher roots

The inspiring earth; how otherwise avails

The leaf-creating sap that sunward shoots?

So every year that falls with noiseless flake

Should fill old scars up on the stormward side,

And make hoar age revered for age's sake,

Not for traditions of youth's leafy pride.