Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt,

With distant eye broods over other sights,

Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace,

The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace,

And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost,

And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry,

After the first betrayal of the frost, Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky;

The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold,

To the faint Summer, beggared now and old,

Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring eye.

The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush;

The maple-swamps glow like a sunset

Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's foot,

Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye,

Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot,

The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires,

Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires;

In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.

Below, the Charles, a stripe of nether sky,

Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by,

Now flickering golden through a woodland screen,

Then spreading out, at his next turn beyond,

A silver circle like an inland pond Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.

Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight

Who cannot in their various incomes share, From every season drawn, of shade

and light,

Who sees in them but levels brown and bare;

Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free

On them its largess of variety, For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.

In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green,

O'er which the light winds run with glimmering feet:

Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen,

There, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet;

And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd,

As if the silent shadow of a cloud Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.

All round, upon the river's slippery edge,

But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant,

From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains

Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt,

And the roused Charles remembers in his veins

Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost,

That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost

In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns.

Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, 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 thawsapped cliff,

Or when the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there.

THE GROWTH OF THE LEGEND

A FRAGMENT

A LEGEND that grew in the forest's hush Slowly as tear-drops gather and gush, When a word some poet chanced to say Ages ago, in his careless way,

Brings our youth back to us out of its shroud

Clearly as under yon thunder-cloud

I see that white sea-gull. It grew and grew,

From the pine-trees gathering a sombre hue,

Till it seems a mere murmur out of the vast

Norwegian forests of the past;

And it grew itself like a true Northern pine,

First a little slender line,

Like a mermaid's green eyelash, and then

anon

A stem that a tower might rest upon, Standing spear-straight in the waist-deep

moss,

Its bony roots clutching around and across, As if they would tear up earth's heart in their grasp

Ere the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp;

Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine,

To snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine,

Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor,

Hearing waves moan again on the perilous shore

Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow 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.