Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like de

vice, 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 stiff

Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff,

Beyond the 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,

Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes;

The early evening with her misty dyes Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh,

Relieves the distant with her cooler sky,

illumined gaze.

Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;

Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame

That thither many times the Paint

er came;

soothes the wearied eyes.

tree and tall.

'Twixt the frothed gnashing tusks of some ship-crunching bay.

So, pine-like, the legend grew, stronglimbed 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;

'T was 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

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 To-day's busy hive,

There the legend takes root in the agegathered 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 nevertracked 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, halflighted, 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,

But skulk in the depths of the 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;