month ago, Dear native town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,- to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day, And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250 The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through 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, And dim to me the forge's roar- Past which, in one bright trail, the ing blast; hangbird's flashes blend. Something of kindred more than Like a mermaid's green eyelash, sympathy; and then anon For in thy bounds I reverently A stem that a tower might rest 270 upon, laid away That blinding anguish of for- Standing spear-straight in the saken clay, waist-deep moss, That title I seemed to have in Its bony roots clutching around earth and sea and sky, That portion of my life more choice to me (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole) Than all the imperfect residue can be ; The Artist saw his statue of the soul Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke, The earthen model into fragments broke, And without her the impoverished seasons roll. 280 THE GROWTH OF THE LEGEND A FRAGMENT A LEGEND that grew in the forest's hush Slowly as tear-drops gather and gush, When a word some poet chanced to say Ages ago, in his careless way, Brings our youth back to us out of its shroud and across, As if they would tear up earth's heart in their grasp Ere the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp; Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine, Clearly as under yon thunder- To force these wild births of the cloud woods under glass, I see that white sea-gull. It grew And so, if 't is told as it should be From the pine-trees gathering a Though 't were sung under Vensombre hue, ice's moonlight of gold, Till it seems a mere murmur out You would hear the old voice of its of the vast Norwegian forests of the past; 10 And it grew itself like a true Northern pine, First a little slender line, mother, the pine, Murmur sealike and northern through every line, And the verses should grow, selfsustained and free, 38310B Round the vibrating stem of the Where the lake's frore Sahara of never-tracked white, parent tree. melody, Like the lithe moonlit limbs of the When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost, 40 As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost; 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? Then the legends go with them, 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 50 With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor. Yes, wherever the pine-wood has Ere it shrinks to the camp-fire's companioning gleam, never let in, Since the day of creation, the light That it saw the fierce ghost of the and the din Red Man crouch back Of manifold life, but has safely To the shroud of the tree-trunk's invincible black; armful of shade, conveyed From the midnight primeval its There the old shapes crowd thick round the pine - shadowed camp, 80 Which shun the keen gleam of the And has kept the weird Past with its child-faith alive Mid the hum and the stir of To scholarly lamp, And the seed of the legend finds A CONTRAST THY love thou sendest oft to me, This fruitless husk which dustward dries Hath been a heart once, hath been young; The world with flattery stuffed On this bowed head the awful With weary step and bleeding And there, with eyes that goad me feet, Still knocking at the heart of pride yet, The ghost of my Ideal stands ! And offering grace, though still | God bends from out the deep and denied. EXTREME UNCTION Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be Alone with the consoler, Death; Far sadder eyes than thine will see 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 hundredfold?' This crumbling clay yield up its Can I look up with face aglow, breath; These shrivelled hands have deeper stains Than holy oil can cleanse away, Hands that have plucked the world's coarse gains I have been innocent; God knows When first this wasted life began, As erst they plucked the flowers Not grape with grape more kindly And the great Maker did not scorn O glorious Youth, that once wast Out of himself to fashion me: He sunned me with his ripening 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 altar stone, The sacred vessels moulder near, The image of the God is gone. THE OAK How yield I WHAT gnarlèd stretch, what The trust for such high uses given? depth of shade, is his! There needs no crown to mark the forest's king; Heaven's light hath but revealed How in his leaves outshines full a track Whereby to crawl away from heaven. summer's bliss! Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring, |