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So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall,

As the Gipsy 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 sup ply;

'Twas a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there, A true part of the landscape as sea, land, and

air;

For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was To force up these wild births of the woods under glass,

And so, if 'tis told as it should be told,

Though 'twere 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 hang, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody,

Like the lithe sun-steeped limbs of the parent tree.

Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food For their grim roots is left when the thousandyeared wood

The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing

From Michael's white shoulder-is hewn and de

faced

By iconoclast axes in desperate waste,

And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long, Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song?

Then the legends go with them,- -even yet on the

sea

A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree,

And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the

core

With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.

Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never let in,
Since the day of creation, the light and the din
Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed

From the midnight primeval its armful of shade,
And has kept the weird Past with its sagas alive
'Mid the hum and the stir of To-day's busy hive,
There the legend takes root in the age-gathered
gloom,

And its murmurous boughs for their tossing find

room.

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 never-tracked

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 which 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, half-lighted, 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;

There the old shapes crowd thick round the pineshadowed camp,

Which shun the keen gleam of the scholarly lamp, And the seed of the legend finds true Norland

ground,

While the border-tale's told and the canteen flits round.

A CONTRAST.

THY love thou sentest oft to me,
And still as oft I thrust it back;
Thy messengers I could not see
In those who every thing did lack,—
The poor, the outcast, and the black.

Pride held his hand before mine eyes,
The world with flattery stuffed mine ears;
I looked to see a monarch's guise,

Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years,
Poor, naked, fettered, full of tears.

Yet, when I sent my love to thee,
Thou with a smile didst take it in,
And entertain❜dst it royally,

Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin,
And leprous with the taint of sin.

Now every day thy love I meet,

As o'er the earth it wanders wide,
With weary step and bleeding feet,
Still knocking at the heart of pride
And offering grace, though still denied.

EXTREME UNCTION.

Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be
Alone with the consoler, Death;
Far sadder eyes than thine will see

This crumbling clay yield up its breath;
These shrivelled hands have deeper stains
Than holy oil can cleanse away,-

Hands that have plucked the world's coarse gains As erst they plucked the flowers of May.

Call, if thou canst, to those gray eyes

Some faith from youth's traditions wrung;
This fruitless husk which dustward dries
Has been a heart once, has been young;
On this bowed head the awful Past

Once laid its consecrating hands;
The Future in its purpose vast

Paused, waiting my supreme commands.

But look! whose shadows block the door?
Who are those two that stand aloof?
See on my hands this freshening gore
Writes o'er again its crimson proof!
My looked-for death-bed guests are met;—
There my dead Youth doth wring its hands,
And there, with eyes that goad me yet,
The ghost of my Ideal stands !

God bends from out the deep and says,-
"I gave thee the great gift of life;
Wast thou not called in many ways?

Are not my earth and heaven at strife?

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