And states shall move free-limbed, loosed In dreary wreck, and crumbling desola melt away, from war's cramping mail. tion reigns. Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like de vice, With leaden pools between or gullies bare, The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice; No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, 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, Or when the close-wedged fields of ice Transfiguring street and shop with his The early evening with her misty dyes Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, illumined gaze. er came; And tones the landscape down, and One elm yet bears his name, a feathery soothes the wearied eyes. tree and tall. turns, The westward horseman rides through | And without her the impoverished sea clouds of gold away, As if they would tear up earth's heart in their grasp Ere the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp ; cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine, Its For in thy bounds I reverently laid To away snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine, That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky, Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor, Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow | Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never groped its way 'Twixt the frothed gnashing 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; 'T was a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there, True part of the landscape as sea, land, and air; For it grew in good times, ere the fash ion it was To force 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 grow, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody, Like the lithe moonlit 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. let in, Since the day of creation, the light and the din 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 There the old shapes crowd thick round | This fruitless husk which dustward dries the pine-shadowed camp, Hath been a heart once, hath been Which shun the keen gleam of the schol young; On this bowed head the awful Past Paused, waiting my supreme com- But look! whose shadows block the door? Who are those two that stand aloof? See on my hands this freshening gore Writes o'er again its crimson proof! My looked-for death-bed guests are met; There my dead Youth doth wring its hands, And there, with eyes that goad me yet, The ghost of my Ideal stands! God bends from out the deep and says, "I gave thee the great gift of life; Wast thou not called in many ways? Are not my earth and heaven at strife? gave thee of my seed to sow, I Bringest thou me my hundred-fold?" Can I look up with face aglow, And answer, "Father, here is gold"? I have been innocent; God knows What bands of love and service bind Christ still was wandering o'er the earth 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, And Heaven's rich instincts in me grew, |