idly,

Like a dim fleet by starving men besieged,

Conjectured half, and half descried afar,

Helpless of wind, and seeming to slip back

Adown the smooth curve of the oily

Within his tent as if I were a bird,
Or other free companion of the earth,
Yet undegenerate to the shifts of men.
Among them one, an ancient willow,
spreads

Eight balanced limbs, springing at once all round

His deep-ridged trunk with upward slant diverse,

In outline like enormous beaker, fit For hand of Jotun, where mid snow and mist

He holds unwieldy revel. This tree, spared,

I know not by what grace,- for in the blood

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,

flowing,

Till it possessed me wholly, and 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

Become 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 below;

Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy,
Dilated in the broad blue over all.
I was the wind that dappled the lush

seats,

Making an o'erturned box their table. Oft

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

eyes,

Climb high to swing and shout on perilous boughs,

Or, from the willow's armory equipped With musket dumb, green banner, edgeless sword,

Make good the rampart of their treeredoubt

'Gainst eager British storming from below,

And keep alive the tale of Bunker's Hill.

Here, too, the men that mend our village ways,

Vexing Macadam's ghost with pounded slate,

Their nooning take; much noisy talk they spend

On horses and their ills; and, as John Bull

Tells of Lord This or That, who was his friend,

So these make boast of intimacies long With famous teams, and add large estimates,

By competition swelled from mouth to mouth,

Of how much they could draw, till one, ill pleased

To have his legend overbid, retorts: "You take and stretch truck-horses in