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,
Or piety of native sweet, was doomed.
And if there be who nurse unholy faiths,
Fearing their god as if he were a
wolf

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 Thessalian oaks, loved by some maid

Of royal stirp, that silent came and vanished,

As near her nest the hermit thrush, nor dared

Till it possessed me wholly, and thought ceased,

Or was transfused in something to which thought

Is coarse and dull of sense. Myself was lost,

Gone from me like an ache, and what remained

Became a part of the universal joy. My soul went forth, and, mingling with the tree,

Danced in the leaves; or, floating in the cloud,

Saw its white double in the stream below;

Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy,
Dilated in the broad blue over all.

I was the wind that dappled the lush

To be the guest of haystack or of hedge, Nobly superior to the household gear That forfeits us our privilege of nature. I bait him with my match-box and my pouch,

Nor grudge the uncostly sympathy of smoke,

His equal now, divinely unemployed. Some snack of Robin Hood is in the

seen,

Not without fruit of solitary thought. He, as the habit is of lonely men, Unused to try the temper of their mind In fence with others, positive and shy, Yet knows to put an edge upon his speech,

Pithily Saxon in unwilling talk. Him I entrap with my long-suffering knife,

And, while its poor blade hums away in sparks,

Sharpen my wit upon his gritty mind, In motion set obsequious to his wheel, And in its quality not much unlike.

Nor wants my tree more punctual visitors.

The children, they who are the only rich, Creating for the moment, and possessing Whate'er they choose to feign,

still with them

for

seats,

Making an o'erturned box their table. Oft

The shrilling girls sit here between school hours,

And play at What's my thought like? while the boys,

With whom the age chivalric ever bides, Pricked on by knightly spur of female

eyes,

Climb high to swing and shout on perilous boughs,

Or, from the willow's armory equipped With musket dumb, green banner, edgeless sword,

Make good the rampart of their treeredoubt

'Gainst eager British storming from below,

And keep alive the tale of Bunker's Hill.

Here, too, the men that mend our village ways,

Vexing McAdam's ghost with pounded slate,

Their nooning take; much noisy talk they spend

On horses and their ills; and, as John Bull

Tells of Lord This or That, who was his friend,

So these make boast of intimacies long With famous teams, and add large estimates,

By competition swelled from mouth to mouth,

Of how much they could draw, till one, ill pleased

To have his legend overbid, retorts: "You take and stretch truck-horses in a string

From here to Long Wharf end, one thing I know,

Not heavy neither, they could never draw,

Ensign's long bow!" Then laughter loud and long.

So they in their leaf-shadowed micro

cosm

Image the larger world; for wheresoe'er Ten men are gathered, the observant eye Will find mankind in little, as the stars Glide up and set, and all the heavens revolve

In the small welkin of a drop of dew.

I am content, nor need to blush; I take

My little gift of being clean from God,
Not haggling for a better, holding it
Good as was ever any in the world,
My days as good and full of miracle.
I pluck my nutriment from any bush,
Finding out poison as the first men
did

By tasting and then suffering, if I must. Sometimes my bush burns, and sometimes it is

A leafless wilding shivering by the wall; But I have known when winter barberries

prise

Of savor whose mere harshness seemed divine.

Shall man say whence your virtue is, or how

Ye make medicinal the wayside weed?