After long weary days I stood again And waited at the Parting of the Ways; Again the figure of a woman veiled Stood forth and beckoned, and I followed now:

Down to no bower of roses led the path. But through the streets of towns where chattering Cold

Hewed wood for fires whose glow was owned and fenced, Where Nakedness wove garments of warm wool

Not for itself; - or through the fields it led

Where Hunger reaped the unattainable grain,

Where Idleness enforced saw idle lands, Leagues of unpeopled soil, the common earth,

Walled round with paper against God

and Man.

"I cannot look," I groaned, "at only these ;

The heart grows hardened with perpetual wont,

And palters with a feigned necessity,
Bargaining with itself to be content;
Let me behold thy face."

The Form replied: "Men follow Duty, never overtake; Duty nor lifts her veil nor looks behind."

But, as she spake, a loosened lock of hair

Slipped from beneath her hood, and I, who looked

To see it gray and thin, saw amplest gold;

Not that dull metal dug from sordid earth,

But such as the retiring sunset flood Leaves heaped on bays and capes of island cloud.

"O Guide divine," I prayed, "although not yet

may repair the virtue which I feel. Gone out at touch of untuned things and foul

With draughts of Beauty, yet declare how soon!"

"Faithless and faint of heart," the voice returned,

"Thou see'st no beauty save thou make it first;

Man, Woman, Nature, each is but a glass

Where the soul sees the image of herself,

Visible echoes, offsprings of herself. But, since thou need'st assurance of how

soon,

Wait till that angel comes who opens all,

The reconciler, he who lifts the veil, The reuniter, the rest-bringer, Death."

I waited, and methought he came; but how,

Or in what shape, I doubted, for no sign,

By touch or mark, he gave me as he passed:

Only I know a lily that I held Snapt short below the head and shrivelled up;

Then turned my Guide and looked at me unveiled,

And I beheld no face of matron stern, But that enchantment I had followed

WHEN I was a beggarly boy,
And lived in a cellar damp,
I had not a friend nor a toy,

But I had Aladdin's lamp;
When I could not sleep for cold,
I had fire enough in my brain,
And builded, with roofs of gold,

My beautiful castles in Spain !

Since then I have toiled day and night, I have money and power good store, But I'd give all my lamps of silver bright,

For the one that is mine no more; Take, Fortune, whatever you choose, You gave, and may snatch again;

I have nothing 't would pain me to lose, For I own no more castles in Spain !

AN INVITATION.

NINE years have slipt like hour-glass sand

From life's still-emptying globe away, Since last, dear friend, I clasped your hand,

And stood upon the impoverished land, Watching the steamer down the bay.

I held the token which you gave, While slowly the smoke-pennon curled O'er the vague rim 'tween sky and wave, And shut the distance like a grave, Leaving me in the colder world.

The old worn world of hurry and heat, The young, fresh world of thought and

scope,

While you, where beckoning billows fleet

Climb far sky-beaches still and sweet,
Sank wavering down the ocean-slope.

You sought the new world in the old,
I found the old world in the new,
All that our human hearts can hold,
The inward world of deathless mould,
The same that Father Adam knew.

He needs no ship to cross the tide,
Who, in the lives about him, sees
Fair window-prospects opening wide
O'er history's fields on every side,
To Ind and Egypt, Rome and Greece.

Whatever moulds of various brain
E'er shaped the world to weal or woe,
Whatever empires' wax and wane,
To him that hath not eyes in vain,
Our village-microcosm can show.

Come back our ancient walks to tread,
Dear haunts of lost or scattered friends,
Old Harvard's scholar-factories red,
Where song and smoke and laughter

sped

The nights to proctor-haunted ends.

Constant are all our former loves, Unchanged the icehouse-girdled pond, Its hemlock glooms, its shadowy coves, Where floats the coot and never moves, Its slopes of long-tamed green beyond.

Our old familiars are not laid, Though snapt our wands and sunk our books;

They beckon, not to be gainsaid, Where, round broad meads that mowers wade,

The Charles his steel-blue sickle crooks.

Where, as the cloudbergs eastward blow,

From glow to gloom the hillsides shift Their plumps of orchard-trees arow, Their lakes of rye that wave and flow, Their snowy whiteweed's summer drift.

There have we watched the West unfurl

A cloud Byzantium newly born, With flickering spires and domes of pearl,

And vapory surfs that crowd and curl
Into the sunset's Golden Horn.

There, as the flaming occident
Burned slowly down to ashes gray,
Night pitched o'erhead her silent tent,
And glimmering gold from Hesper
sprent
Upon the darkened river lay,

Where a twin sky but just before
Deepened, and double

swallows

Hung visioned trees, that, more and

Up a ridged beach of cloudy gray,
Curved round the east as round a bay,
It slips and spreads its gradual tide.
Then suddenly, in lurid mood,
The moon looms large o'er town and
field

As upon Adam, red like blood,
'Tween him and Eden's happy wood,
Glared the commissioned angel's shield.
Or let us seek the seaside, there
To wander idly as we list,
Whether, on rocky headlands bare,
Sharp cedar-horns, like breakers, tear
The trailing fringes of gray mist,

Or whether, under skies full flown,
The brightening surfs, with foamy din,
Their breeze-caught forelocks backward
blown,

Against the beach's yellow zone,
Curl slow, and plunge forever in.

And, as we watch those canvas towers
That lean along the horizon's rim,
"Sail on," I 'Il say; may sunniest

hours

Convoy you from this land of ours, Since from my side you bear not him!"

For years thrice three, wise Horace said,

A poem rare let silence bind ;
And love may ripen in the shade,
Like ours, for nine long seasons laid
In deepest arches of the mind.

Come back! Not ours the Old World's good,

The Old World's ill, thank God, not

ours;

But here, far better understood,
The days enforce our native mood,
And challenge all our manlier powers.

Kindlier to me the place of birth
That first my tottering footsteps trod;
There may be fairer spots of earth,
But all their glories are not worth
The virtue of the native sod.

Thence climbs an influence more benign Through pulse and nerve, through heart and brain;

Sacred to me those fibres fine That first clasped earth. O, ne'er be mine

The alien sun and alien rain!

These nourish not like homelier glows
Or waterings of familiar skies,
And nature fairer blooms bestows
On the heaped hush of wintry snows,
In pastures dear to childhood's eyes,

Than where Italian earth receives
The partial sunshine's ampler boons,
Where vines carve friezes 'neath the
eaves,

And, in dark firmaments of leaves,
The orange lifts its golden moons.

THE NOMADES.

WHAT Nature makes in any mood
To me is warranted for good,
Though long before I learned to see
She did not set us moral theses,
And scorned to have her sweet caprices
Strait-waistcoated in you or me.

I, who take root and firmly cling,
Thought fixedness the only thing;
Why Nature made the butterflies,
(Those dreams of wings that float and
hover

At noon the slumberous poppies over,)
Was something hidden from mine eyes,
Till once, upon a rock's brown bosom,
Bright as a thorny cactus-blossom,
I saw a butterfly at rest;
Then first of both I felt the beauty;
The airy whim, the grim-set duty,
Each from the other took its best.

Clearer it grew than winter sky
That Nature still had reasons why;
And, shifting sudden as a breeze,
My fancy found no satisfaction,
No antithetic sweet attraction,
So great as in the Nomades.

Scythians, with Nature not at strife,
Light Arabs of our complex life,

390

SELF-STUDY.

A PRESENCE both by night and day,
That made my life seem just begun,
Yet scarce a presence, rather say
The warning aureole of one.

And yet I felt it everywhere;
Walked I the woodland's aisles along,
It seemed to brush me with its hair;
Bathed I, I heard a mermaid's song.

How sweet it was! A buttercup
Could hold for me a day's delight,
A bird could lift my fancy up
To ether free from cloud or blight.

Who was the nymph? Nay, I will see,
Methought, and I will know her near;
If such, divined, her charm can be,
Seen and possessed, how triply dear!

So every magic art I tried,
And spells as numberless as sand,
Until, one evening, by my side
I saw her glowing fulness stand.

Gasping under titanic ferns;
Ribs of rock that seaward jut,

Granite shoulders and boulders and

snags,

Round which, though the winds in heaven be shut,

The nightmared ocean murmurs and yearns,

Welters, and swashes, and tosses, and turns,

And the dreary black sea-weed lolls and wags;

Only rock from shore to shore, Only a moan through the bleak clefts blown,

With sobs in the rifts where the coarse kelp shifts,

Falling and lifting, tossing and drifting,
And under all a deep, dull roar,
Dying and swelling, forevermore,
Rock and moan and roar alone,

And the dread of some nameless thing unknown,

These make Appledore.

These make Appledore by night:
Then there are monsters left and right;
Every rock is a different monster;
All you have read of, fancied, dreamed,
When you waked at night because you
screamed,

There they lie for half a mile,
Jumbled together in a pile,
And (though you know they never once
stir),

If you look long, they seem to be moving

Just as plainly as plain can be, Crushing and crowding, wading and shoving

Out into the awful sea,

Where you can hear them snort and