All round the wood's edge creeps

the skirting blaze

Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days,

Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

O'er yon low wall, which guards

one unkempt zone, Where vines, and weeds, and scruboaks intertwine

Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone

Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine,

The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves

A prickly network of ensanguined leaves;

Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.

Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary,

Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's foot,

Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye,

Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot,

The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires,

Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal

fires;

And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops,

A decorous bird of business, who provides

For his brown mate and fledglings six besides,

And looks from right to left, a farmer 'mid his crops.

Another change subdues them in the Fall,

But saddens not; they still show merrier tints,

Though sober russet seems to cover all;

When the first sunshine through their dew-drops glints,

Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across,

Redeems with rarer hues the season's loss,

As Dawn's feet there had touched and left their rosy prints.

Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest,

Lean o'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill,

While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west,

Glow opposite; - the marshes drink their fill

And swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade

Through pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade, Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simond's darkening hill.

Later, and yet ere Winter wholly shuts,

Ere through the first dry snow the

And until bedtime plays with his desire,

Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates;

Then, every morn, the river's banks shine bright

With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail,

By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night,

'Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail,

Giving a pretty emblem of the day When guiltier arms in light shall melt away,

And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war's cramping mail.

And now those waterfalls the ebbing river

Twice every day creates on either side

Tinkle, as through their freshsparred grots they shiver

In grass-arched channels to the sun denied;

High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow,

The silvered flats gleam frostily below,

Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the glassy tide.

But crowned in turn by vying seasons three,

Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; This glory seems to rest immovably,

The others were too fleet and vanishing;

When the hid tide is at its highest flow,

O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow

With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything.

The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind,

As pale as formal candles lit by day; Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind;

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, - 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

And without her the impoverished

seasons roll.

'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 tree,

And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the core

With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.