About the bough to help his housekeep

ing, Twitches and scouts by turns, blessing his luck,

Yet fearing me who laid it in his way, Nor, more than wiser we in our affairs, Divines the providence that hides and helps.

Heave, ho! Heave, ho! he whistles as the twine

Slackens its hold; once more, now! and a flash

Lightens across the sunlight to the elm

Where his mate dangles at her cup of felt.

Nor all his booty is the thread; he trails

My loosened thought with it along the air,

And I must follow, would I ever find The inward rhyme to all this wealth of life.

Of our New World subduers lingers yet Hereditary feud with trees, they being (They and the red-man most) our fathers' foes,

Is one of six, a willow Pleiades,

The seventh fallen, that lean along the brink

Where the steep upland dips into the marsh,

Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing,

Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank.

The friend of all the winds, wide-armed he towers

And glints his steely aglets in the sun, Or whitens fitfully with sudden bloom Of leaves breeze-lifted, much as when a shoal

Of devious minnows wheel from where a pike

Lurks balanced 'neath the lily-pads, and whirl

A rood of silver bellies to the day.

Alas! no acorn from the British oak 'Neath which slim fairies tripping wrought those rings

Of greenest emerald, wherewith fireside life

Did with the invisible spirit of Nature wed,

Was ever planted here! No darnel fancy

Might choke one useful blade in Puritan fields;

With horn and hoof the good old Devil

came,

The witch's broomstick was not contra

band,

But all that superstition had of fair.

This willow is as old to me as life;
And under it full often have. I stretched,
Feeling the warm earth like a thing
alive,

And gathering virtue in at every pore Till it possessed me wholly, aud thought ceased,

Or was transfused in something to which thought

Is coarse and dull of sense. Myself was lost,

Gone from me like an ache, and what remained

Became a part of the universal joy. My soul went forth, and, mingling with the tree,

Danced in the leaves; or, floating in the cloud,

Saw its white double in the stream be

Whose feet are known to all the popu lous ways,

And many men and manners he hath seen,

Not without fruit of solitary thought. He, as the habit is of lonely men,Unused to try the temper of their mind In fence with others, -positive and shy, Yet knows to put an edge upon his speech,

Pithily Saxon in unwilling talk. Him I entrap with my long-suffering knife,

And, while its poor blade hums away in sparks,

Sharpen my wit upon his gritty mind, In motion set obsequious to his wheel, And in its quality not much unlike.

Nor wants my tree more punctual visitors.

The children, they who are the only rich, Creating for the moment, and possessing Whate'er they choose to feign, - for still with them

Kind Fancy plays the fairy godmother, Strewing their lives with cheap material For winged horses and Aladdin's lamps, Pure elfin-gold, by manhood's touch profane

To dead leaves disenchanted, - long ago

Between the branches of the tree fixed seats,

Making an o'erturned box their table. Öft

The shrilling girls sit here between school hours,

And play at What's my thought like? while the boys,

With whom the age chivalric ever bides, Pricked on by knightly spur of female