VI.

'Tis a woodland enchanted! Ah, fly unreturning!

Yet stay ;

"Tis a woodland enchanted,
Where wonderful chances
Have sway;

Luck flees from the cold one
But leaps to the bold one
Half-way;

Why should I be daunted?

Still the smooth mirror glances, Still the amber sand dances, One look, then away!

O magical glass!

Canst keep in thy bosom
Shades of leaf and of blossom
When summer days pass,

So that when thy wave hardens
It shapes as it pleases,
Unharmed by the breezes,
Its fine hanging gardens?
Hast those in thy keeping,
And canst not uncover,
Enchantedly sleeping,
The old shade of thy lover?
It is there! I have found it!
He wakes, the long sleeper!
The pool is grown deeper,
The sand dance is ending,
The white floor sinks, blending
With skies that below me
Are deepening and bending,
And a child's face alone

That seems not to know me,
With hair that fades golden
In the beaven-glow around it,
Looks up at my own;

Ah, glimpse through the portal
That leads to the throne,
That opes the child's olden
Regions Elysian!

its Ah, too holy vision

For thy skirts to be holden
By soiled hand of mortal!
It wavers, it scatters,
'Tis gone past recalling!
A tear's sudden falling
The magic cup shatters,
Breaks the spell of the waters,
And the sand cone once more,
With a ceaseless renewing,
Its dance is pursuing

On the silvery floor,

O'er and o'er,

With a noiseless and ceaseless renewing.

VII.

'Tis a woodland enchanted!
If you ask me, Where is it?
I only can answer,

'Tis past my disclosing;
Not to choice is it granted
By sure paths to visit
The still pool enclosing
Its blithe little dancer;
But in some day, the rarest
Of many Septembers,
When the pulses of air rest,
And all things lie dreaming
In drowsy haze steaming
From the wood's glowing embers,
Then, sometimes, unheeding,
And asking not whither,

By a sweet inward leading
My feet are drawn thither,
And, looking with awe in the
magical mirror,

I see through my tears,
Half doubtful of seeing,
The face unperverted,
The warm golden being
Of a child of five years;

And spite of the mists and the

error,

And the days overcast,

Can feel that I walk undeserted, But for ever attended

By the glad heavens that bended

Blackest Pennsylvanian stone;

TO MY FIRE.

For, from out thy catacomb,
Day and night thy wrath is blown
In a withering simoom,
And, adown that cavern drear,
Thy black pitfall in the floor,
Staggers the lusty antique cheer,
Despairing, and is seen no more!

Oh thou of home the guardian Lar, And, when our earth hath wandered far

Into the cold, and deep snow covers The walks of our New England lovers,

Their sweet secluded evening-star! 'Twas with thy rays the English Muse

Ripened her mild domestic hues; 'Twas by thy flicker that she conned

The fireside wisdom that enrings With light from heaven familiar things;

By thee she found the homely faith

In whose mild eyes thy comfort stay'th,

When Death, extinguishing his torch,

Gropes for the latch-string in the porch;

The love that wanders not beyond His earliest nest, but sits and sings While children smooth his patient wings;

Therefore with thee I love to read Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs

Life in the withered words! how swift recede Time's shadows! and how glows again

Through its dead mass the incandescent verse,

As when upon the anvils of the brain

It glittering lay, cyclopically wrought

By the fast-throbbing hammers of
the poet's thought!
Thou murmurest, too, divinely
stirred,

The aspirations unattained,
The rhythms so rathe and delicate,
They bent and strained

weight

Of any airiest mortal word.

VII.

What warm protection dost thou bend

Round curtained talk of friend with friend,

While the gray snow-storm, held aloof,

To softest outline rounds the roof, Or the rude North with baffled strain

Shoulders the frost-starred window-pane!

Now the kind nymph to Bacchus borne

By Morpheus' daughter, she that

seems

Gifted upon her natal morn By him with fire, by her with dreams,

Nicotia, dearer to the Muse
Than all the grape's bewildering
juice.

We worship, unforbid of thee;
And, as her incense floats and curls
In airy spires and wayward whirls,
Or poises on its tremulous stalk
A flower of frailest revery,
So winds and loiters, idly free,
The current of unguided talk,
Now laughter-rippled, and now
caught

In smooth, dark pools of deeper thought.

Meanwhile thou mellowest every word,

A sweetly unobtrusive third;
For thou hast magic beyond wine,
To unlock natures each to each;
The unspoken thought thou canst

divine;

Thou fill'st the pauses of the speech With whispers that to dream-land reach

And frozen fancy-springs unchain
In Arctic outskirts of the brain;
Sun of all inmost confidences,
To thy rays doth the heart unclose
Its formal calyx of pretences,
That close against rude day's of
fences,

And open its shy midnight rose !