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 learned One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned. For Humanity sweeps onward: where today 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 return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn. 'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves Of 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 valour, 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 flee The 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, 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, The squirrel on the shingly | And roams the savage Past of his shag-bark's bough undwindled rights. 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 sight Who 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 free On them its largess of variety, For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare. In Spring they lie one broad O'er which the light winds run And purpler stains show where As if the silent shadow of a cloud Hung 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 breezeentangling sedge; Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, 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 fill And swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade Through 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 bedtime plays with his desire, Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates; Then, every morn, the river's banks shine bright With smooth plate - armour, 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 day When 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 river Twice every day creates on either side Tinkle, as through their freshsparred grots they shiver In grass-arched channels to the sun denied ; High flaps in sparkling blue day; Gropes to the sea the river The brown ricks, snow-thatched White crests as of some just 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 plains Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, And the roused Charles remembers in his veins Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost, That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns. Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, With leaden pools between or The blocks lie strewn, a bleak No life, no sound, to break the Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down 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 scenes To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes ; The early evening with her misty dyes And Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, 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 flow To 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 the hillock's house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, |