15.

"Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the

heart to scold.

Dear dead women, with such hair, too

what's become

of all the gold

Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and

grown old.

BY THE FIRESIDE.

1.

How well I know what I mean to do

When the long dark Autumn evenings come, And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? With the music of all thy voices, dumb In life's November too!

2.

I shall be found by the fire, suppose,

O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age, While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, And I turn the page, and I turn the page, Not verse now, only prose!

3.

Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip, "There he is at it, deep in Greek ·

Now or never, then, out we slip

To cut from the hazels by the creek

A mainmast for our ship."

4.

I shall be at it indeed, my friends!
Greek puts already on either side
Such a branch-work forth, as soon extends
To a vista opening far and wide,
And I pass out where it ends.

5.

The outside-frame like your hazel-trees
But the inside-archway narrows fast,

And a rarer sort succeeds to these,
And we slope to Italy at last

And youth, by green degrees.

6.

I follow wherever I am led,

Knowing so well the leader's hand

Oh, woman-country, wooed, not wed,

Loved all the more by earth's male-lands, Laid to their hearts instead!

7.

Look at the ruined chapel again
Half way up in the Alpine gorge.
Is that a tower, I point you plain,
Or is it a mill or an iron forge
Breaks solitude in vain?

8.

A turn, and we stand in the heart of things;
The woods are round us, heaped and dim;
From slab to slab how it slips and springs,
The thread of water single and slim,
Thro' the ravage some torrent brings!

9.

Does it feed the little lake below?
That speck of white just on its marge
Is Pella; see, in the evening glow

How sharp the silver spear-heads charge When Alp meets Heaven in snow.

10.

On our other side is the straight-up rock ; And a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it By boulder-stones where lichens mock

The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit Their teeth to the polished block.

11.

Oh, the sense of the yellow mountain flowers, And the thorny balls, each three in one, The chestnuts throw on our path in showers, For the drop of the woodland fruit's begun These early November hours

12.

That crimson the creeper's leaf across

Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt, O'er a shield, else gold from rim to boss, And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped Elf-needled mat of moss,

13.

By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged
Last evening-nay, in to-day's first dew
Yon sudden coral nipple bulged

Where a freaked, fawn-coloured, flaky crew
Of toadstools peep indulged.

14.

And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge
That takes the turn to a range beyond,

Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge
Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond
Danced over by the midge.

15.

The chapel and bridge are of stone alike,
Blackish gray and mostly wet;

Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke.
See here again, how the lichens fret
And the roots of the ivy strike!