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, From the midnight primeval its armful of shade, 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, Pride held his hand before mine eyes, Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years, Yet, when I sent my love to thee, Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin, Now every day thy love I meet, As o'er the earth it wanders wide, EXTREME UNCTION. Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be This crumbling clay yield up its breath; 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; Once laid its consecrating hands; Paused, waiting my supreme commands. But look! whose shadows block the door? God bends from out the deep and says,- Are not my earth and heaven at strife? |