BY THE FIRESIDE.

I.

OW well I know what I mean to do

HOW

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!

II.

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!

III.

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

Now then, or never, out we slip

To cut from the hazels by the creek A mainmast for our ship!"

IV.

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.

Oh woman-country, wooed not wed,

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

VII.

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?

VIII.

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!

IX.

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!

X.

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.

XI.

Oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers,
And 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,

XII.

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,

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XIII.

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 toad-stools peep indulged.

XIV.

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.

XV.

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!

XVI.

Poor little place, where its one priest comes
On a festa-day, if he comes at all,

To the dozen folk from their scattered homes,
Gathered within that precinct small

By the dozen ways one roams

XVII.

To drop from the charcoal-burners' huts,

Or climb from the hemp-dresser's low shed,

Leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts,
Or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread
Their gear on the rock's bare juts.

XVIII.

It has some pretension too, this front,
With its bit of fresco half-moon-wise
Set over the porch, Art's early wont:
'Tis John in the Desert, I surmise,
But has borne the weather's brunt-

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