"How many times have you sat at gaze Till the mouldering fire forgot to blaze, Shaping among the whimsical coals Fancies and figures and shining goals! What matters the ashes that cover those? While hickory lasts you can toast your toes. "O dream-ship-builder! where are they all, Your grand three-deckers, deep-chested and tall, That should crush the waves under canvas piles, And anchor at last by the Fortunate Isles? There's gray in your beard, the years turn foes, While you muse in your arm-chair, and toast your toes." Pipe blown through by the warm wild | Motionless, with heaped canvas drooping breath of the West idly, Like a dim fleet by starving men be sieged, Conjectured half, and half descried afar, Helpless of wind, and seeming to slip back | Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing, Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank. The friend of all the winds, wide-armed he towers And glints his steely aglets in the sun, Or whitens fitfully with sudden bloom Of leaves breeze-lifted, much as when a shoal Of devious minnows wheel from where a pike Lurks balanced 'neath the lily-pads, and whirl A rood of silver bellies to the day. Alas! no acorn from the British oak 'Neath which slim fairies tripping wrought those rings Of greenest emerald, wherewith fireside life Did with the invisible spirit of Nature wed, Was ever planted here! No darnel fancy Might choke one useful blade in Puritan fields; With horn and hoof the good old Devil came, The witch's broomstick was not contraband, But all that superstition had of fair, That snuffed round every home and was not seen, There should be some to watch and keep alive All beautiful beliefs. And such was that, By solitary shepherd first surmised Under Thessalían oaks, loved by some maid Of royal stirp, that silent came and vanished, As near her nest the hermit thrush, nor dared Confess a mortal name, that faith which gave A Hamadryad to each tree; and I Will hold it true that in this willow dwells The open-handed spirit, frank and blithe, |