away,

And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.

Beyond the hillock's house-bespotted swell,

Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise,

Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell,

Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise,

Where dust and mud the equal year divide,

There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died,

Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.

Virgilium vidi tantum,

seen

I have

That thither many times the Paint

er came;

One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.

Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow,

Our only sure possession is the past; The village blacksmith died a month ago,

And dim to me the forge's roaring blast;

Soon fire-new medievals we shall

see

Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree,

And that hewn down, perhaps, the beehive green and vast.

How many times, prouder than king on throne,

Loosed from the village schooldame's A's and B's,

Panting have I the creaking bellows blown,

And watched the pent volcano's red increase,

Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down

By that hard arm voluminous and brown,

From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.

Dear native town! whose choking

elms each year

With eddying dust before their time

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 shrunk 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 frothy gnashed 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;

'Twas a natural growth, and stood fear

lessly 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 '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 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 thousand-yeared 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 defaced

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

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, halflighted, 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 pine-shadowed 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.

Christ still was wandering o'er the earth
Without a place to lay his head;
He found free welcome at my hearth,
He shared my cup and broke my
bread:

Now, when I hear those steps sublime,
That bring the other world to this,
My snake-turned nature, sunk in slime,
Starts sideway with defiant hiss.

Upon the hour when I was born,

God said, "Another man shall be," And the great Maker did not scorn Out of himself to fashion me; He sunned me with his ripening looks,

years

A spark of the eternal God; And to what end? How yield I back The trust for such high uses given? Heaven's light hath but revealed a track Whereby to crawl away from heaven.

Men think it is an awful sight

To see a soul just set adrift On that drear voyage from whose night The ominous shadows never lift; But 't is more awful to behold A helpless infant newly born, Whose little hands unconscious hold The keys of darkness and of morn. Mine held them once; I flung away

Those keys that might have open set The golden sluices of the day,

But clutch the keys of darkness yet ;I hear the reapers singing go

Into God's harvest; I, that might With them have chosen, here below Grope shuddering at the gates of night.

O glorious Youth, that once wast mine! O high Ideal! all in vain

Ye enter at this ruined shrine Whence worship ne'er shall rise again;

The bat and owl inhabit here,

The snake nests in the altar-stone, The sacred vessels moulder near, The image of the God is gone.

THE OAK.

WHAT gnarled stretch, what depth of shade, is his!

There needs no crown to mark the forest's king;

How in his leaves outshines full summer's bliss!