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THE BIRCH-TREE.

RIPPLING througn thy branches goes the sunshine,
Among thy leaves that palpitate for ever;
Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had prisoned,

The soul once of some tremulous inland river,

Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb for ever!

While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine, Holds up its leaves in happy, happy silence,

Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended,

I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands,

And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence.

Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet,

Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad,

Dripping about thy slim white stem, whose shadow
Slopes quivering down the water's dusky quiet,

Thou shrink'st as on her bath's edge would some startled Dryad.

Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers;

Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping;
Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience,
And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping
Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping.

Thou art to me like my

beloved maiden,

So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences;
Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leaflets
Sprinkle their gathered sunshine o'er my senses,
And Nature gives me all her summer confidences.

Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble,
Thou sympathizest still; wild and unquiet,
I fling me down; thy ripple, like a river,
Flows valleyward, where calmness is, and by it
My heart is floated down into the land of quiet.

AN INTERVIEW WITH MILES STANDISH.

1 SAT one evening in my room,

In that sweet hour of twilight

When blended thoughts, half light, half gloom,

Throng through the spirit's skylight;

The flames by fits curled round the bars,

Or up the chimney crinkled,

While embers dropped like falling stars,

And in the ashes tinkled.

I sat and mused; the fire burned low,
And, o'er my senses stealing,
Crept something of the ruddy glow

That bloomed on wall and ceiling;

My pictures (they are very few,

The heads of ancient wise men)

Smoothed down their knotted fronts, and grew As rosy as excisemen.

My antique high-backed Spanish chair

Felt thrills through wood and leather,

That had been strangers since whilere, 'Mid Andalusian heather,

The oak that made its sturdy frame

His happy arms stretched over

The ox whose fortunate hide became
The bottom's polished cover.

It came out in that famous bark

That brought our sires intrepid, Capacious as another ark

For furniture decrepid;

For, as that saved of bird and beast

A pair for propagation,

So has the seed of these increased

And furnished half the nation.

Kings sit, they say, in slippery seats;

But those slant precipices

Of ice the northern voyager meets
Less slippery are than this is;

To cling therein would pass the wit
Of royal man or woman,
And whatsoe'er can stay in it

Is more or less than human.

My wonder, then, was not unmixed

With merciful suggestion,

When, as my roving eyes grew fixed
Upon the chair in question,

I saw its trembling arms inclose

A figure grim and rusty,

Whose doublet plain and plainer hose
Were something worn and dusty.

Now even such men as Nature forms

Merely to fill the street with,

Once turned to ghosts by hungry worms,

Are serious things to meet with;

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