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, Or when the close-wedged fields of ice Transfiguring street and shop with his crunch here and there. But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: Here nothing harsh or rugged inter venes; The early evening with her misty dyes Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, illumined gaze. er came; And tones the landscape down, and One elm yet bears his name, a feathery soothes the wearied eyes. tree and tall. Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow | Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never groped its way '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 under glass, And so, if 't is told as it should be told, Though 't were sung under Venice's moonlight of gold, You would hear the old voice of its mother, the pine, Murmur sealike and northern through every line, And the verses should grow, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody, Like the lithe moonlit limbs of the parent tree. let in, 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 ; |