Class. mJ 3 ^lo Copyright N° I^HjO- COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Old-Fashio?ied Garde?! a?id Other Verses (out of print) The Brandyzvine Illustrated by Robert Shaw ^0-50 Swarthmore Idylls Illustrated by Robert Shaw $0'5o In a Brandyzvine Harvest Field ^0*25 Old Meeting-Houses Illustrated $1.00 /;; Memory of Whittier Illustrated ^o-50 The Farm Calendar Illustrated ^o-50 In preparation: Collected Poems Any of the above sent postpaid on receipt of price THE BIDDLE PRESS 1010 Cherry Street Philadelphia BRAND YWINE DAYS ;s5 I BRANDYWINE DAYS Or, The Shepherd's Hour-Glass By JOHN RUSSELL HAYES 1* Illustrations by ]. CARROLL HAYES Frontispiece by ROBERT SHAW Philadelphia: The Biddle Press London : Headley Brothers 1910 The author wishes to thank the editors of The Book- Lover y Book News Monthly^ Everybody's Magazine, Friends' hitelligencery Lippincott' s Magazine and The Pathfinder for kind permission to reprint certain of these pages Copyright 1910 By John Russell Hayes DEC 6 iri t To JAMES MONAGHAN ^^ Alike ive loved The muses'' haunts, and all our fancies mcved To measures of old song CONTENTS PAGE PrologTje: In Meadows by the Brandywine 10 JUNE Coming to the Farm 11 Our Old Village 14 The Brandywine 16 Beside this Twilight Shore 21 In the Old Attic 22 The Birds and the Poets 25 Garden Song at Twilight 29 Starry Meadows 30 Sir William Temple 32 Theocritus 35 The Brandywine at Slumberville 39 Devonshire Idyls 41 Morning Rain 43 A World of Green 46 Among the Golden Wheat 49 An Old- World Poet 52 JULY PAGE Nature's Healing 55 Book-Hunting in London 57 "Old Fishing and Wishing" 60 Old Hills My Boyhood Knew 65 The Children • 68 Old-Time Eclogues 72 Oxford's Idealist 74 Bion and Moschus 78 One of the Elizabethans 81 Home Scenes 86 The Charm of Flower-Names 88 Midsummer 92 Dream-Ships ^ 94 An "Exquisite Sister" 96 Virgil of the Eclogues 99 Adown the Brandywine 103 An Hour with Herrick 106 Silvia 114 The Same Old Ways 119 The Brook 122 New Poets 124 AUGUST PAGE Even-Song 133 A Cuyp Landscape 136 In Sir William Temple's Garden 140 "Sweet Themmes! Runne Softly" 143 In Quiet Waters 144 After Harvest 147 Humphry Marshall 150 "Colin Cloute" 152 A Dead Poet 156 Cities of the Heart 159 My Lady Slumbers 162 Country Peace 165 Up Stream 167 Up the Delaware 169 Below the Bridge 174 The Dream-River 176 The Upper Brandywine 178 Threshing the Wheat o 180 SEPTEMBER PAGE Autumnal Hours 183 Googe's Eclogues Once More 187 Spirit of September 189 A Disciple of Keats 192 Walter Pater Again 196 The Indian's Grave 201 More of Vaughan's Verses 204 At Cedarcroft , 206 Old and New Pastoral Poets 208 With Lloyd Miffin's Sonnets 212 The Old- Fashioned Garden 213 The Gifts of God 217 Autumn Silence 219 A Celtic Poet 220 Cecily 225 The Sage of Marshallton Again 226 Farewell to the Farm 228 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Opposite Page 'Meadows by the Bra?idywine^^ {^fro?itispiece\ \J * Pastoral repose a?id pensivetiess^^ -TJa/' ' The tiny town in old-world Oxfordshire^ ' ^S ^ 'The garden in a golden dream^^ 27 \/ 'Peaceful stream-side fields'''' ^O v 'Among the peaceful farms it flows'*'' jp y 'By silver Brandywine^ s Arcadian stream'''* j-j- y 'Long-loved oaken solitudes'''' 66 J 'Scores of sweet old-fashioned blooms^'' go 'A land of peaceful quietude'''' loj The Home of Robert Herrick jo6 ^ "Tis here I love to tvalk at twilight hour"*"* 122 '' 'Below the ancient grassy hill it flows'''' i^g "' * The old mansion invites the passer-by to pause and reflect ' ' 750 ,. ' The woodland cool and stilT ' 1^8 \ 'The brook sings on with ceaseless music ^^ l6ji 'Small willows bend above'''' l6y '' * Where curves the Brandywine below the bridge^ ' . . . 174 ' 'This green untroubled meadow-side'''' ^79 'Peace and old-time charm'''' 1 86 'Thy deep charm ^ O how I shall remember'''' .... i^li 'Leafy summer solitudes'''' 202' 'The old farmstead wrapt in autunni' s dream'^ .... 228' O MEMORY, call back the hours Of childhood's day among the flowers That grew in gardens sweet and old Beneath those skies of misty gold That 7nade the summers seem divine In meadows by the Brandy wine! Call back the breezes warm and sweet That drowsed across the yellow wheat And made the sylvan valleys ring With music light as dryads sing. With music faint and faery-fine. In meadows by the Brandywinel Dear Me?nory, call back again The soft and silver wraiths of rain That bent the buttercups, and sivayed The sleepy clover-heads, and made The hosts of dancing daisies shine In meadows by the Brandywinel Call back the glow-wor?n's elfin fire That wavered where the marshy choir Made reedy music ghostly-light Across the fragrance of the night. Till lucent stars began to shine O'er meadows by the B?'andyiuineJ far, sweet hours, what strange regret Brings tears for you to-night, while yet 1 would not have your magic be More than a dream — a dream — to me, A dream of vanished hours divine In meadoivs by the Brandywinel COMING TO THE FARM ''I never list presume to Parnasse hill. But, pyping low in shade of lowly grove, I play to please myself e, all be it ill.'' — The Shepheards Calender "^ — I'UNE XV. Spenser's lines must stand at the head ^ £* of my little Book of Hours, my Shepherd's Hour- Glass, for Spenser is held In honor of all the clan of shepherds — Spenser "Who taught mee homely, as I can, to make." And here beside my ancestral stream the Brandywine, or old Indian Wawassan, as I rid me of the dust of clamor- ous streets, on this sweet mid-day of June, and take up once again my shepherd's crook and rural quill, I thank the dear God that He still keeps green for town-wearied folk such lovely nooks as this. How true are those words of Keats, — "To one who has been long in city pent, 'Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven, — to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament." O meadows of buttercups and daisies, ye green old willows and hillsides of fragrant wheat and clover, and thou beloved soft-flowing Brandywine — once more we come to pass the summer-tide amid your enchantments. Here in the new-old joys — the companionship of "mine own people," the babble and laughter of sweet children, [11] Brandywine Days music and happy song and the coming of gracious friends, quiet reverie and hours with the poets, beside our sylvan stream, in cool orchards and bird-haunted groves — the weeks will flow by like a dream of felicity. It is the hour of noon ; we have unpacked our impedi- menta and have ranged on the high little shelf over the fire- place Spenser and Herrick, Wordsworth and Keats, and Pater, and Fitzgerald's "Omar," the stout little "Com- pleat Angler" and the other delightful volumes. We have gone to the mossy spring-house down beyond the orchard and quaffed a drink divine from the limpid pool near the cream jars and the white custards that are cooling for our first country dinner. The bells are ringing by the old farm houses in the valley, and the farm folk are com- ing merrily down the hills to take their nooning. Sitting here at the ample secretary-desk, where my forefathers for generations have written up their farm- ing accounts, and entered in their journals the record of pilgrimings to distant meetings and of the coming of their fellow-Quakers on perennial visits — sitting here with fresh-pointed quill (in reality only a poor steel pen!), and musing on the cool, calm, old-fashioned charm of this an- cient House and idyllic landscape, I indite in the broad pages of my diary the opening impressions of this sum- mer's sojourn. Diary, did I say! forgive the word, shades of my fathers in this old Home. Hour-Glass let me rather name it, for old-time's sake and because a poet- loving Celtic friend of mine suggests the title; and "Shep- herd's Hour-Glass" for old Spenser's sake. "Ye Shep- heards Houre-Glasse" Spenser would have spelt it, in that delightful century of his when each man spelt as pleased [12] CO O a. Coming to the Farm him best, and before or-thog-ra-phers and such trouble- some folk were born. Here, then, the lowliest of shepherds records our com- ing to this antique Home by the Brandywine. So here to this old Farmstead have we come, A quaint red-gabled solitary House Breathing of peace and silence musical. Beauty and quietude and dreamfulness, — An old ancestral Home among its fields. Its garden flowers and swaying orchard boughs, Here in the heart of this still countryside Where broods the atmosphere of elder days. Fragrant of memories and sentiment And happy friendship. Here sleeps soft repose, A pastoral repose and pensiveness, Virgilian in its dreamy, tranquil charm. — O how my heart goes out in happy thought To this old Home and all its memories, Its golden past, its hallowed links that bind us To those dear souls gone with the long-dead years! [13] OUR OLD VILLAGE JUNE XVI aN ancient mansion falling to decay, A blacksmith's shop and seven cottages Among their gardens, and one white farm house, Make up this hamlet by the Brandywine, — A sleepy village wrapt In drowsy peace And lazy silence, save when at the forge A horse Is shod, making the anvil ring With rhythmic music ; or when farmers meet Beside the watering-trough and talk of crops, The roads, the weather and the price of wheat. Above the village silently and slow The Brand5rwine moves under sylvan shades. But at the smithy sweeps forth In the sun And murmurs down a pebbly slope, and v/Inds With merry song below a garden wall. Like to the village Goldsmith dearly loved It seems to me, this hamlet quaint and small, Where Time stands still, and ancient usages Give it an air of peace and old-time charm. — And I remember happy half-hours here Beside the blacksmith's door, watching his fire Send up its sparks, or listening to the droll Converse of rustic humorists or the tales Of mighty fishing In the Brandywine. [14] ^ ;s- ^ w> >^ -o. «1 ;^ ^ ^ o i 1 § o^ si ? Co § 3' o (5l CO 2- s: "* o 1 ?ij >- Ti. ■^ <:^ Our Old Village O kindly, unambitious, homely hearts, 'Tis good to come among you once again And hear your friendly greetings. Little change The years have wrought in your secluded homes; And while the busy world has hurried on With restless energy, you are content With quiet tasks and quiet country ways. The silver Brandywine with lulling song Soothes all the sunny air, and drowsily The locusts hum among your garden trees. While from the farms that hem your hamlet in The ripening corn sends down its fragrant breath ; And tranquilly as in the tiny town Of old thatched roofs and gabled cottages Whence came my sires in old-world Oxfordshire, Life slumbers on In your untroubled shades. — Peace and contentment evermore abide In your quaint hamlet by the Brandywine! [15] THE BRANDYWINE "Clear and gentle stream! Known and loved so long. That hast heard the song And the idle dream Of my boyish day." ^— I'UNE XVII. Our beautiful Brandywlne "with Its ^^w tributaries and enshrining hills, the very heart and centre of old Chester County," Is most widely known for Its association with that fateful day In 1777, when Washington led his colonials across the hills of Birmingham, and when Lafayette — last flower of the old French chivalry — was wounded In battle. Near Its banks lived and wrote Bayard Taylor, who deeply loved the "peace and blissful pastoral seclusion" of these Ches- ter County meadows; and here on a summer's day Sidney Lanier, meditating his lyric "Clover," exclaimed, "Dear uplands, Chester's favorable fields! . I He as lies yon placid Brandywine, Holding the hills and heavens in my heart For contemplation." A third son of the muses, T. Buchanan Read, drew inspiration from his native stream; and there is no Ches- ter-countian, of any sentiment at all, who does not cherish a pride In the Revolutionary memories of the Brandywine, and a yet deeper afiFectlon for the stream for Its own fair sake as being his "home river." [16] T'he Brandywine ''The rivers of home are dear in particular to all men," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. As one may love the vi^ind- ing Schuylkill, another the Wissahickon's woodland pools, or a third the soft and faery beauty of the Susquehanna — so is the Brand3rwine endeared to those who have spent endless summer days along its green banks and floated on its placid reaches; and particularly so when the bond is the stronger by force of ancestral association with some old farmstead and willow-bordered meadow beside the beautiful stream. "Susqueco," one of the musical names given it by the Indians, seems to ally it in a measure to the Susquehanna; and the resemblance goes beyond that of the names, for in its lesser way our Chester County stream has the same alternate charm of tranquil deeps and of sparkling rapids that distinguishes that loveliest of Pennsylvania rivers. Nay, our Brandywine has a special character of its own, and that is its pastoral or idyllic aspect. Few are the minor streams that so completely satisfy one's sense of peaceful and untroubled rural tranquillity, or beside whose calm waters he would rather pitch his tent or read his favorite poets. The grey old homesteads and venerable barns of the Brandywine valley seem an inseparable part of the landscape, around which cluster the dear associa- tions and memories of generations. The corn has sprung upon these hillsides and given of its golden wealth through countless Octobers ; it seems almost as if there could never have been a time when the wheat did not lie in abund- ant sheaves on these uplands in the silent midsummer nights, or the apples grow mellow and fall to earth in the long, drowsy days of September. It is a region of placid [17] Brandywine Days and serene security, such a happy countryside as Virgil, immortal laureate of husbandry, would have described with affectionate art — such an opulent land as we read of in the ancient Odyssey, where *'pear upon pear waxes old, and apple upon apple — yea, and cluster ripens upon clus- ter of the grape." The very fishermen that haunt its shores seem to par- take of the stream's lazy placidity; it was long ago de- spoiled of its finer fish, but still may these patient anglers be seen, seated in their favorite nooks under some droop- ing willow or white-armed buttonwood, where the turf Is softest, waiting through the quiet hours for the nibbles that so seldom disturb their motionless corks. Yet one cannot call these hours idly spent, for the true angler is of honest Izaak's ilk, and his hours of serene contempla- tion beget in him a vein of mild philosophy, rendering him sweet of temper and most companionable. The lit- erary fisherman is perhaps not seen here so often, yet there are those who love equally well to read and to fish. "Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; And dreams or falls asleep, While curious fishes peep About his nibbled bait." Flowing down through the heart of Old Chester County, the Brandywine enriches many a secluded dale and meadow where the quiet cattle graze beside the odor- ous mint and the nodding buttercups. Curve by curve it winds among the folded hills, silencing and receiving [18] The Brandywine Into its tranquil bosom "the filtered tribute of the rough woodland" from the thousand little brooks that purl and babble down the slopes of wild grass and crimson clover. Beneath the arching boughs it drifts, home of the squirrel and fox, and of the wood-robin that pours out his solitary song in cool sylvan retreats. Wild grapes hang over the water, the stately cloud-fleets sail slowly above and melt away beyond the hill, and the locust shrills in the loneliness of the hot noontide hour. As the twilight hour draws on it is pleasant to push one's boat far from shore and watch the closing of the day on the farms. Down from the hillside come the shout of the farmer's boy and the lowing of far cattle; and the idler in his boat knows that in the old stone barns the horses are crunching their oats and hay, that the swal- lows are nested beneath the eaves, and the pigeons have ceased their day-long crooning. Then, as he rows slowly In the sunset glow, while the boat's eddies lap the lily- pads and set all the reeds to nodding, he will perhaps pass in his musing fancy from these scenes to the green downs of England, where at this hour the "tender ewes, brought 1101116 with evening sun, Wend to their folds, And to their holds The shepherds trudge when light of day is done." After all, the associations that cluster about a stream make it beautiful to us beyond other waters ; if one's dear- est memories are allied with the Delaware, the Susquehan- na, or the Wissahlckon, that particular home-stream Is to him fairer than all others. To Chester County folk our [19] Brandywine Days sweet pastoral Brandywine must ever have an especial appeal; there the grass is softest, the plashing of^the water most melodious, and there the twilight grieving of the ring-dove most touches the heart. For us these remem- bered hills are clothed with beauty, and these misty woods with enchantment. Something of ancestral feeling awakes as the thought of peaceful townships with their names that carry us back to the old hills and valleys of England and Wales; "Tredyffrin, Cain and Nantmeal hold Traditions of those sires of old; While Uwchlan in her inmost vale May hear at eve some Cambrian tale." Truly, we bless the tranquil serenity of the grey homesteads about which the memories of our fathers are I yet green! "Old homes ! old hearts ! Upon my soul forever Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter; Like love they touch me, through the years that sever, With simple faith; like friendship, draw me after The dreamy patience that is theirs forever." [20] BESIDE THIS TWILIGHT SHORE JUNE XVIII XWILL not ask for more, — Only one love-song sorrowful and golden Beside this twilight shore, Sweet as Ulysses heard in legends olden, — I will not ask for more ; Beside this twilight shore One love-song with its pathos sweet and olden, — I will not ask for more, — Yearning with sorrows and with memories golden Beside this twilight shore. [21] IN THE OLD ATTIC I'UNE XIX. We awake this morning to country ffl- sunshine and joyance; the blackbirds chatter in the tall maples, and from its home in the wood- land edge the ring-dove is softly pleading. The long- silent old House is sad only in memory now, for its halls are vocal with the song of children, merry, merry children, "Crazy with laughter and babble and earth's new wine." The tender melancholy of the ring-dove's note seems veritably a token of the sentiment of the old House in these bright June hours, a ''pensive recollection" mingling with its present blithe music. Through all the months between our summers here, the ancient Homestead dreams in solitude. The tall colonial clock ticks not, but stands mournful in its shadowy corner; the midnight mouse plays on the moonlit garret floor; and the quaint harpsichord stands silent and immelodious, a memorial of some an- cestral "gentlewoman of the old school" who held not so strictly to the Quaker rule that she must shut music out of her sweet life. "I know she played and sang, for yet We keep the tumble-down spinet To which she quavered ballads set By Arne or Jackson." In those long still months of autumn and winter the shuttered windows reflect no sunset skies, and the moan- ing winds pile with their store of faded leaves the deep doorways and the flag-paven porches. The great pine and [22] In the Old Attic the maples sway about the red chimneys, strewing the ground with ruined nests; November rains drip, drip sadly upon the mossy shingles; and the snows whiten roof and lawn and deserted Garden with their noiseless drift, across which the shy tree-dwellers leave their tiny foot- prints unseen save of the lonely old House. Naught but the venerable Mansion is witness of those shifting sea- sons or listener to the wild harmonies of the December storms. But now the dream-year has ebbed away, and awaken- ing June fills the once-quiet halls with its flood of soft light, its "Sunshine beating in upon the floor Like golden rain," — and its enchantments of echoed bird-song and joyous child- life. Already the little folk — Brown-eyes and Ray and pen- sive Bunny and romping Will — have clambered to the old attic, that dreamland of childish hearts. Among its lumber of venerable furniture and hair trunks and anti- quated finery they are making merry. How the garret ghosts must ache to be thus rudely encroached upon, and the mice scamper to their inmost holes below the rafters! The dear little folk are looking up with wonder at the strings of lavender and herbs that fill the dim attic with faint aromas; and now I hear the quaint lacquered spinet quavering in high and sorry tones under the touch of cu- rious small fingers. Those melancholy and mournful echoes of airs long forgotten, and the soft fragrance of the dried lavender, rouse thoughts fainter even than memories [23] Brandywine Days or dreams — of the far-off days when the antique harpsi- chord stood In its pride in the ample drawing-room, and the youths and maidens of the hamlet, prim and sedate in their flowered silks and other dainty apparel, passed from singing part-songs around the little instrument to stroll among the lavender beds and the "laylock" and hollyhock corridors of the glowing Garden. Ah, bonny children, you have started a pleasant vein of reverie for me this day, with your romping up beneath the eaves. It is in such hours, amid musings like these, and looking out upon so fair a landscape, that one has some glimpse of the abiding truth of things. It was William W. Story, I think, who wrote. "Ah Heaven ! we know so much who nothing know ! Only to children and in poets' ears, At whom the wise world wondering smiles and sneers, Secrets of God are whispered here below. Only to them, and those whose gentle heart Is opened wide to list for Beauty's call, Will Nature lean to whisper the least part Of that great mystery which circles all." [24] THE BIRDS AND THE POETS ^'In this sequester d nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard-seat! And flowers and birds once more to greet , My last years friends together." ^ — J'UNE XX. This blithe morning the finches and ii- red-breasts are chirruping, the yellow orioles flash in and out among the green orchard boughs, and from the far wood edge come the pensive notes of the ring-dove. Ah, that plaintive call of the ring-dove! — no sound in this Brandywine valley rings so vividly in the ear of memory as that solemn sweet call across the fields through all the long drowsy dreamy summer days and on into the enchanted twilight. Ah, gentle mourner, what soft pain is thine, What tender melancholy stirs thy breast? Perchance some old romantic sorrow lies , About thy heart, or memory of wrong Done to thy kind long since in some green vale Of dim Thessalian woods. Thy pensive note No elegy can match, and thy sweet woe Makes memorable the sacred twilight hour. So ran my thought, in my love for this sorrowing and mystic singer; but, as Alice Brown has asked, who may "translate the desolation of the dove? For even in the common speech Of feathered fellows, each to each, Abideth still the primal mystery, The brooding past, the germ of life to be." [25] Brandywine Days Countless are the tiny carollers among the leaves in these primal days of summer. Now, and through the months to come, their gushing music will echo around us, an inseparable and supernal accompaniment to all God's wild beauty. How the songs of birds have filled the ears of the dreamers in every age ! Our English poesy is forever mel- odious with the choirs of the air. I open a favorite an- thology, and the first poem, written a century before Chaucer, begins thus jubilantly, "Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu !" And the latest magazine has, from the pen of John Burroughs — who is cheering his latter days with one bird- poem after another — a lyric on the bush sparrow; the tiny caitiff purloins my grapes, sighs the old bird-lover, but "Still I bid him welcome, The pilf'ring little dear; He pays me off ih music, And pays me every year." So we hear the birds warbling through all the pages of English verse from first to last. Milton gives us his favorite nightingale. Sorrow's own singer, "Most musical, most melancholy;" — and the same wondrous bird has been enshrined forever by Keats in the deep Celtic pathos of that ode written be- neath the trees, of a May morning, while the young poet [26] I The Birds and the Poets yet thrilled with the recollection of Philomela's midnight music. "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird ! No hungry generations tread thee down ; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown : Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home. She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." The skylark, beloved alike of Shakespeare and Shelley, chants his dewy matins at the golden gate of heaven — unforgetably — for if the skylark should unhappily disap- pear from earth, he would still live for all time in Cymbe- line and the Sonnets, in many a line of Wordsworth, and In the throbbing stanzas of that almost last, surely most perfect, of Shelley's lyrics: "All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass." If our American songsters have not received their meed of praise from classic poets, they have had very beau- tiful celebration from some of our latter-day bards. The vireo, the mocking-bird, the meadow lark, the yellow-breast and the thrush, deserve the noblest words of Sidney Lanier, Celia Thaxter, Henry van Dyke, J. Russell Taylor and the others. The last-named poet portrays very Intimately the Inner melody of some of our homeland songsters. I know of no finer American laureate of the birds. Witness this lyric, — [27] Brandywine Days 'Blow softly, thrush, upon the hush That makes the least leaf loud, Blow, wild of heart, remote, apart From all the vocal crowd, Apart, remote, a spirit note That dances meltingly afloat, Blow faintly, thrush ! . . . O lightly blow the ancient woe. Flute of the wood, blow clearly! Blow, she is here, and the world all dear. Melting flute of the hush. Old sorrow estranged, enriched, sea-changed, Breathe it, veery-thrush !" [28] GARDEN SONG AT TWILIGHT JUNE XXI © HE sunset's golden flush, as daylight closes, Wraps all the garden in a golden dream, The while you sit, dear heart, among the roses, And watch the sleepy stream. The marigold droops low, the poppy dozes, The lotus slumbers in a golden dream, And your own queenly head among the roses Bends toward the sleepy stream. Now let my lute with music's heavenly closes Mingle its magic with your golden dream. Until the moon's soft fire above the roses Silvers the sleepy stream. Dream on, dear love, while every flower-heart dozes, Let all your soul dissolve in golden dream ; And I will guard my saint among the roses Beside the sleepy stream. [29] STARRY MEADOWS "The phantom flood of dreams has ebbed and vanished with the dark, And like a dove the heart forsakes the prison of the ark; Now forth she fares through friendly woods and diamond-fields of dew. While every voice cries out 'Rejoice!' as if the world were new." '^ J'UNE XXII. Faery cloudlets hover and float above \^^ us this fresh green June day, the wood pigeon renews her sorrowing plaint, cat-birds chatter among the wild raspberry bushes, and in the gurgling of the song-sparrow I hear voices of the long ago — the song-sparrow, the blithe little friend to whom Celia Thaxter wrote affectionate greeting, "My little helper, ah, my comrade sweet, My old companion in that far-off time When on life's threshold childhood's winged feet Danced in the sunrise ! Joy was at its prime When all my heart responded to thy song Unconscious of earth's discords harsh and strong." The poppies float on the billowing acres of wheat like crimson foam on that yellow tide, the grass stands lush and deep on the long slopes of the hillsides, and the meadows are starred with gem-like bells and florets of brilliant hues. Delicate white and pink and golden, these flowers are like those which Botticelli strewed with winsome art over the [30] Starry Meadows fragrant turf in his strangely fascinating "Spring" — or like those in the foregrounds that Fra Angel.ico rejoiced to paint into the little panels that enrich the walls of the mediaeval cells in San Marco. These blooms of ours fade away with the fading sum- mer. Not so those pictured flowers; they bloom with an immortality of ineffable beauty on the monastery walls. And what happiness, one must think, for the holy breth- ren amid their fasts and absolutions, their observance of matins and complines, to return from the spirit-world of adoration to those radiant pictures of sweet Tuscan river- meadows set about the white feet of angels! And Sav- onarola himself, in that quaint Roman seat of his that stands yet in his severe cell, — were his dreams not height- ened and his heart touched by those fragments of idealized earthly loveliness which Angelico had placed in everlast- ing brightness in that grey home of prayer ! And those Pre-Raphaelite starry meadows found a late reincarnation when Edward Burne-Jones — truly a mod- ern holy brother in gentleness and spiritual vision — and his friend the fine-souled Morris, created the fair work of their combined arts of design and loom-weaving, the tapestry with which they made more beautiful the fra- grant chapel of their own Exeter College. Yes, in these very fields about us here by the Brandy- wine I may live again in imagination and memory those rare hours in the Florentine shrine and in the Oxford sanc- tuary beneath the centuried windows of the silent Bod- leian Library. [31] SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE Sir William loved his life of lettered ease Among the shadows of his Surrey trees, Among his gardens and his books and bees ; — I love his memory that he loved all these. ^" — j'UNE XXI 1 1. To go down into green Surrey to ffi* Farnham, sleepy old town on the pastoral Wey, and out to Moor Park and its old-world felic- ities, is to gain an abiding interest in one of England's finest types of old-time country gentleman. Further, if it be one's fortune, as it was mine, to find on a bookstall the four leather-clad octavos entitled The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart., with Lely's handsome portrait of the author, and printed in London in 1757, by Lintot, Tonson, and others of those rubicund booksellers of Pope's acquaintance, — his happiness will be complete. Some pleasant hours have I spent over these Works beside the Brandywine, only a few miles up-stream from the farms and gardens where Sir William's American descendants still live. In this region of ''blissful pastoral seclusion," as Bayard Taylor called his home-land, it seems fitting to say something of our noble author and his devotion to the country life. I take it that your true book-lover extends his affection very easily to old red-brick country mansions, to fragrant box hedges and old-fashioned flowers; he holds dear the very locusts that hum so drowsily in warm August noons, the sigh of the light summer wind among the beeches [32] Sir William Temple and soft evergreens, the red cherry leaves drifting across the orchard grass. He need only look into his heart, in order to v^^rite, with Cowley, "Ah, yet, ere I descend to the Grave, May I a small House and large Garden have, And a few Friends, and many Books, both true, Both wise, and both delightful, too!" To come upon Sir William Temple's essay, "Of Gar- dening," is like finding pale rose-petals between the pages of some cherished volume. This "sweet garden essay," as Charles Lamb termed it, recalls half-forgotten days of long ago in our grandmothers' gardens ; the songs of child- hood, the spicy pinks beside the wall, the old formal por- traits in the "best room" — such memories awake at the opening of one of these old books. And in our author's stately discourse, "Of Health and Long Life," I hear once again the staid Quakers — Temples and others — who around the "First-day" dinner exchanged advice on this same vital theme, seasoning their homely recipes with a certain flavor of old-time speech. To the boy beside them their words seemed formal and perhaps lacking in humor ; but his read- ing in sundry journals and epistles of seventeenth-century Quakers has since convinced him that those grave but cheery country folk spoke and wrote a diction that has come straight from the days of Penn and Temple, a dic- tion that is charming for its unfailing dignity, mingled with affectionate friendliness. Almost can I hear again the old, broad-brimmed, drab-coated J W of my boyish reverence as I read Sir William Temple's opening observation on Health : [33] Brandywine Days "Peace is a public blessing, without which no man is safe in his fortunes, his liberty, or his life. . . . Health is the soul that animates all enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless, if not dead, without it." Very cheery and affable a host and table companion was good Sir William, delighting In making those about him happy and easy; very skilful In avoiding disputes and In turning his conversation, as his sister avers, "to vv^hat was more easy and pleasant, especially at table, where, he said, 111 humour ought never to come, and his agreeable talk at it, If It had been set down, would have been very entertaining to the reader, as well as it was to so many that heard it. He had a very familiar way of conversing with all sorts of people, from the greatest p-rlnces to the meanest servants, and even children, whose imperfect language and natural and innocent talk he was fond of, and made entertainment out of everything that could afford it." Such pictures rise as I turn the pages of these old vol- umes of Temple's ^Vorks here by the Brandywine; and I am happy in believing that such a type of conservative, affable, friendly, democratic country gentleman is not a lost type, and that in some of these long-settled families among the ancient farms up and down the stream these noble characteristics still survive. [34] THEOCRITUS ""O Singer of the field and fold, Theocritus! Pans pipe was thine, — Thine was the happier Age of Gold. ''For thee the scent of new-turned mould. The bee-hives, and the murmuring pine, O Singer of the field and fold!" ^ — I'UNE XXIV. Professor Palgrave once said that \^^ Keats' Ode to Autumn is such a poem as Theoc- ritus might have delighted to compose; and in- deed the lovely realism of Keats' perfect pastoral is in the best mode of the earlier singer, with its impassioned vision of Autumn's goddess drowsing beside the half- reaped furrow among twined flowers, or dreamily musing by the dripping cider-press, while all about are laden vines and apples blushing red, sweet nuts and unending wealth of September's golden flowers. With soft adagio of insect- swarms, bleat of sheep and twitter of homing swallows, the poem dies down like the close of some enchanting melody. Truly, Theocritus himself could not have re- ported the pensive hours of early autumn in southern England more faithfully, more tenderly! Conversely, we may well imagine with what exquisite report Keats might have immortalized afresh — could he have visited Sicily-^that land of ilex and iris, of mossy fountains and vineyards ages old, of wild roses and galingale and sleepy poppies, where the yellow spurge [35] Brandywine Days blooms in the lava rifts and the broken columns of antique temples are festooned with rose-vines, — that land where amid the countr5^side simplicity every shepherd is a natural poet and Daphnis and Lycidas still pipe on rustic flutes beside their straggling flocks. From Keats back through Browne of Tavistock, Spenser, and Lincolnshire's delightful Barnabe Googe, we might trace the slender silver stream of English pastoral lyric to its fountain-head in the eclogues of Virgil and his master Theocritus. Beyond the Sicilian we should deal with his teacher Philetas of Cos and with those idyllic poets of the Linus-song that pass vaguely across one page of the Iliad. But for us the earliest pastoral verse is the verse of Theocritus, in some ten of those thirty idyls or "little pictures" that bear his beautiful name. *'Who will open his doors," he asks, "and receive our Graces to his home?" Have not all the spiritual kinsfolk of the beloved Sicilian, from Virgil to Keats and Tennyson, received those Graces right warmly, loved and cherished them, and set them up as dear patron deities over the exquisite strains of the pastoral flute through all the ages? "Oh, easy access to the hearer's grace When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine! For she herself had trod Sicilian fields, She knew the Dorian water's gush divine, She knew each lily white which Enna yields, Each rose with blushing face; She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain." Where breathe the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain, more authentically than in that most ancient lament of Thyrsis for Daphnis the dead shepherd, composed in that [36] Theocritus soft later Doric dialect whereby Theocritus so faithfully reproduces the rural patois of his simple and friendly peas- ant folk? Like the sweet whispering of a pine-tree by a well of living water are the pipings of his mate the goat- herd, surpassed by Pan alone, — so avows Thyrsis. In re- turn, the goatherd likens the song of Thyrsis to the mel- ody of streams that fall forever from the clifiF. So, be- neath elm shadows and beside the homely wooden images of the gods of field and garden, these rustics ply their syl- van minstrels)^ The prize — a fair, two-handled drinking- cup — is portrayed with loving elaboration: a deep new- carven cup, engarlanded with ivy-twine about its brim, with honeysuckle and saffron fruitage. Engraved thereon standeth a damsel dreamy-sweet, round whom contend her fair-haired lovers. On another panel of the cup is carved an old fisherman, stoutly dragging his casting- net. Hard by, a lad looks upon two foxes that rob a vineyard ; he is plaiting a seemly cricket-trap, this lad, from corn and rushes, joyously working at the soft wicker mesh. Lissom briar entwines the goodly cup ; the prize has cost the goatherd a great white cheese; and all its vir- gin beauty shall belong to Thyrsis, if he will but chant his m.aster-song, the Death of Daphnis. Whereupon the shepherd invokes the muses of bucolic elegy, — "Begin, sweet Maids, begin the sylvan song!" — and then he chants of Daphnis, — Daphnis who now adown the mournful stream of forgetfulness hath gone forever, — Daphnis, dear to the deathless Muses, — Daphnis, whom Aphrodite, heavy of heart, lamented, — Daphnis, who nev- ermore by glen or glade or woodland green shall roam as of old, a joy to every creature of the field. [37] Brandy wine Days Thus soundeth the Death-song of Daphnis, prototype of every noble threnody of later ages. From that simple but highly artistic poem of the Sicilian shepherd-muse have come the inspiration and imagery of our great Eng- lish elegies. The wailing grief, the yearning iteration of the dead shepherd's name, find echo in Spenser's lament for Sidney, "Young Astrophel, the pride of shepherds praise, Young Astrophel, the rusticke lasses love; Far passing all the pastors of his dales." They echo immortally in the melancholy verses of the uncouth swain who sang to the oaks and rills his grief for Lycidas, "dead ere his prinne, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer." And how Shelley touched the Dorian flute, like a sec- ond Theocritus, in those unforgetable op,ening lines! — "I weep for Adonais — he is dead! Oh weep for Adonais ! tho' our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head ! . . . Oh weep for Adonais — he is dead ! Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep !" [38] 5- THE BRAND YWINE AT SLUMBERVILLE JUNE XXV 'DOWN the dales of green Newlln, Among the peaceful farms it flows, And soft and dreamy is the song It chants and murmurs as it goes Beside the woodland cool and still, The Brandywine at Slumberville. Where blow the freshening winds of June Across the green and silver oats, And in the fragrant clover fields The robins trill their faery notes, It drifts below the emerald hill That guards old drowsy Slumberville. Its clear green waters softly sing Among the green and waving reeds, They softly sing among the stems Of green and crimson water-weeds, They softly sing beside the mill And dark mill-race at Slumberville. By daisied meadows deep and sweet Where tranquil cattle dream and dream, Our little river rambles on Full-fed by many a tribute stream; O how its gleam and beauty fill My vision of old Slumberville! [39] Brandy wine Days By homes where honest folk and true Have lived for generations long Among their golden gardens old, It wanders down with sleepy song, By smithy and by rumbling mill. The Brandywine at Slumberville. I hear its music faery-sweet Beneath the silver stars of June, I hear its melancholy voice Beneath the yellow harvest moon Grieving that autumn frosts must fill The golden dales of Slumberville. O never comes to me the song Of thrushes in the poppied wheat, Or under shadowy orchard boughs The ring of childish laughter sweet. But thy rich music haunts me still, O Brandywine at Slumberville! [40] DEVONSHIRE IDYLS TUNE XXVI. ''In Tamar's valley Contentment ffl- has found a haunt. At set of sun, when these clay banks glow and the murmuring shallows gleam with fire; when the voice of the water is a thanks- giving stealing upward and the harmonious murmur of those things that only rivers know; then Content moves along the dewy grasses, and dreams beside the silent pools. In the gloaming hour I have divined her presence on Ta- mar's dark brink." Such words might well describe our Brandywine in its prevalent mood of tranquillity; they are from Eden Phill- potts' delightful book of prose idyls, My Devon Year, — a nature-book of true charm of minute observation, not loaded down with arid science, but alive with fine and affectionate sympathy for the outdoor world in antique Devonshire. Many an hour by the Brandywine has this new author shared a place with Walton and with Jeffer- ies. His volume of reveries deals, as Jefferies' might have dealt, with the wild life and flowers, the quaint folk and the hoary memorials of the loveliest of the counties of southwestern England. He pleads for an intimate love of God's beautiful world. Those who are blind to this love have "never lived alone with the earth. They never felt Nature touch their hearts to patience, lift their unrest call them clear-voiced to braver life and more courageous thinking." Old Devonshire gave us the fine pastoral poet William Browne, whose exquisite pictures of old-time shepherd [41] Brandy wine Days life proved so captivating to the young Keats. Brov^^ne sang v^^ith simple zest of the "jocund crew of youthful swains Wooing their sweetings with delicious strains, Harvest folks, with curds and clouted cream, With cheese and butter, cakes and cates enow, That are the yeoman's from the yoke or cow." One may understand the Brandywine's rustic charm with a deeper appreciation after reading Browne's Britan- nia's Pastorals. And Devonshire gave us the immortal Coleridge; above all, the ancient shire gave us the golden lyrics of rare old Herrick. A fragrant chapter of Phillpotts' vol- ume was written in the graveyard of Robert Herrick's church ; and I envy him the joy of having read the match- less Hesperides amid the very scenes of their composition. "I had sooner read him here and now, amid the life and scent of the things he loved. . . . The hock-cart has van- ished, the song of the wakers is still, and the maypole rises no more upon the village green ; but youth and love, red dawn and golden twilight, dew and rain, and the buds of spring, are immortal . . . welcome now to us as then to him, whose dust lies near my footsteps in this musical resting-place of the dead." [42] MORNING RAIN "Co?ne thou, and brim the meadow streams. And soften all the hills with mist, O falling dew! from burning dreams By thee shall herb and flower be kissed; And Earth shall bless thee yet again, O gentle, gentle summer rain!" ^^-rUNE XXVII. Rain is falling in fitful gusts and kA* flaws, and the ring-dove is heard only in those in- tervals of sunshine that make the lawn's deep turf shine with twinkling drops, and the white cattle gleam among the meadow buttercups. Behind the sombre, an- cient House the golden-honeysuckle is bright, and beyond its rich masses three perfect roses sway on long graceful stems. "O crimson roses bending in the rain !" The farm lads hang idly about the cow-sheds, glad to know that the timothy hay is all safely under roof, and talking of the wheat that will be ready for cutting "next Saturday, or mebbe not till Monday or Tuesday — there's no tellin'." The braver of our bird-friends pipe undaunted now and then, and close to the trunk of the purple beech a robin is sheltering himself from the showers, and watch- ing the weather with his head knowingly cocked on one side. '"Dear little fellow ! though skies may be dreary, Nothing cares he while his heart is so cheery." [43] Brandy wine Days It is a morning for meditation; and gazing out across hill after green hill fading impalpably in rainy distance, I think with affection of this ancient Pennsylvania shire, dear to the heart of every child of her: — Old Chester County, — land of our delight, Founded and watched by Penn, here in the wilds Of his wide Commonwealth, in those far days That now so ancient seem and so remote, So dim with all the mist of vanished years: Dear Chester County, — loved of all thy sons, And best, I think, by those who forth have gone From out thy borders, who around their hearths, In twilight hours when sentiment awakes And old remembrance warms the lonely heart. Speak fondly of thy woodlands and thy hills; Thy meadows musical with harvest cheer ; Thy long white barns where o'er the odorous mows The never-resting swallows sweep and sweep ; Thy drowsy hamlets where the blacksmith's stroke, Measured and clear, is ofttimes the sole sound That breaks the quiet calm ; thy breezy uplands Browsed o'er by lazy cows and fleecy sheep. And, best of all, thy softly-flowing stream. Thy Stream of Beauty, — silver Brandywine. Thy pleasant name, old Shire, from English vales, There in the west by winding Dee, was brought ; And truly, of all tracts in our broad land. These meadows soft and wooded hills most seem Like those of ancient pastoral Cheshire there In old-world England. [44] Morning Rain And thy townships, too, Pennsbury, Nottingham and Fallowfield, Bradford and Warwick and the Coventries, — Their names are redolent of England's fields And England's ancient thorpes and manor-lands. And green Newlin, two centuries ago Settled and 'stablished by an Irish squire, The friend of noble Penn, — green-hilled Newlin, That, with old Drumore in the sister shire Of Lancaster, my heart hath ever loved, Rich in ancestral memories as they are, — Their names I here inscribe with filial hand. [45] A WORLD OF GREEN ''Ohj soft the streams drop music Between the hills. And inusical the birds' nests Beside those rills; The nests are types of home Love-hidden from ills. The nests are types of spirits Love-music fills J^ UNE XXVIII. Lovely this valley of ours after U rain The harvesters drew in the last of their early hay last evening, and so could lie contentedly beneath the rafters vs^hile the summer storm raged through the night. All morning the wraiths of rain slanted across the land- scape, — a vaporous silver veil ; and the Brandywine rose with the flood of waters that rushed down every folding of its hundred hills. This late afternoon the sun has come out palely through sailing clouds, and the wide vale swims in misty gold. We climbed the hill behind the apple trees and gazed long on the enchanting scene, — luscious meadows edged with tufted willows, reddening wheat fields, great rounded slopes of shorn hay-lands, and on many a far hilltop the shadowy, dreaming woodlands. Never have we seen such variety of soft green tints, — the uplands with their "pure light warm green" that Rossetti thought most lovable, the silvery emerald of half-ripe oats swaying in the fragrant [46] A World of Green breeze, the liquid green of water-meads whose rushes and wild grasses are perpetually moist, the exquisite hazy- green of bending water-willows, and the strange shining green of the young corn. In the meadows were scattered little pools, limpid and glassy and rainy-green, like those mysterious waters that gleam from the background of Leonardo's pictures. As Alice Brown has it, "Lucent lagoons lie here berimmed with foam." There was that in the vivid freshness of the landscape, blown over by the soft evening winds, odorous of sweet, moist hay, that suggested a scene along some river of Nor- mandy or Old Provence in one of the lovely paintings of Corot. Thinking in this vein, and turning over this even- ing some prints of the great dreamer's works, I dwell especially on his Dance of Nymphs, Evening. I muse before a landscape of Corot, Wherein the Painter doth express With soft, ideal loveliness All that his loving heart would have us know, All that his Toving eye hath seen. In this old-world idyllic dale, Where silvery vapors pale Hang o'er the little copse of tenderest green. And from the flowery turf Whose half-blown roses toss like faery surf. Fair sisterhoods of slendor poplars rise, Birches and tremulous aspens, delicate trees. Diaphanous, vague and cool, — While by the soft marge of the woodland pool, [47] Brandy wine Days Clear-sculptured on the saffron evening skies, Sweet dryad forms sway in the breeze, Sway, — and veer, — and softly sing Enchanted harmonies to greet the Spring. [48] AMONG THE GOLDEN WHEAT JUNE XXIX XN these last hours of happy-hearted June, When dewy clover-heads their fragrance spill, When all the morn and drowsy afternoon The clear, pure sunshine sleeps on mead and hill, On orchards old and gardens green and still, To bless with fertile heat, — What joy to wander to some shady height Where field on field lies spread before the sight, And muse all day among the golden wheat ! Across the valley go the laden teams, Piled to the ladder's top with sweet, light hay, There where the Brandywine ensilvered gleams As by low willowed banks it makes its way. In far-off daisy fields as white as they The young lambs softly bleat; And little children through the happy hours By yonder wood are gathering pale wild-flowers. While I do naught but muse among the wheat. How pleasant and delightful is it here, Through this long, fragrant, languid day of June, To watch the farmers at their harvest cheer With merry converse and with whistled tune, — To see them share their simple stores at noon 'Neath some old tree's retreat; — To see the cattle with dark eyes a-dream [49] Brandy wine Days Wade in the cooling currents of the stream, While I do naught but muse among the wheat! Great snowy clouds are drifting down the sky, And o'er the silence of the noon-tide hush I hear the locust's languorous, hot cry; From out the green depths of yon pendent bush There pours the lyric music of the thrush ; And from this shady seat I see the farmer's boys among the corn Where they have toiling been since early morn, While I do naught but muse among the wheat. By mossy fences of this upland farm The old sweet-briar rose is twining wild ; Dear flower, its old-time fragrance hath a charm To wake forgotten thoughts and memories mild Of those far years when as a pensive child I came with wandering feet To plucTc these flowers, or ramble hand in hand With him who never more across this land May gaze or muse among the golden wheat. Lo, while I dream, the wind stirs in the leaves, — And hath this lovely day so quickly flown ? The harvesters have left the yellow sheaves, And I am here upon the hills alone; One sad ring-dove with melancholy moan The vesper-hour doth greet. Across the fields the sun is going down. It gilds the steeples of the distant town, And I must cease to muse among the wheat. [50] Among the Golden Wheat Old Chester County, land of peaceful dales, Of misty hills and shadow-haunted woods, — I love the silence of thy pastoral vales, The music of thy Brandywine that broods And dreams through leafy summer solitudes With murmurs dim and sweet. All my child-heart, all glamour of old days, Awake when thus I walk thy country ways And muse in June among the golden wheat! [51] AN OLD-WORLD POET ^ — I'UNE XXX. In his book of cheery maxims, Sorne ffl' Fruits of Solitude, William Penn says: "The Country Life is to be preferr'd, for there we see the works of God . . . the Country is both the Philosopher's Garden and his Library ... a Sweet and Natural Retreat from Noise and Talk, and allows opportunity for Reflection." Henry Vaughan, like Robert Herrick, belongs to the line of authors who find their inspiration amid the country- side seclusion praised by William Penn. A son of that wondrous century which gave us Herrick and Penn and many another elect soul, Vaughan had the angelic vision and childlike naivete of his age. His finest verses adorn every anthology, as, — "I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm as it was bright;" and his splendid recalling of friends lost from earth, in a poem which Lowell held dear, — "They are all gone into the world of light! And I alone sit ling'ring here! Their very memory is fair and bright. I see them walking in an Air of glory;" and his poem, "The Retreate," which Wordsworth echoed in the noble "Intimations of Immortality." Not very far from the days of monkish penance and abasement was the poet who could make this avowal, — [52] An Old- World Poet "Happy those early dayes, when I Shin'd in my Angell-infancy ! Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, Celestial thought. . When on some gilded Cloud or floivre My gazing soul would dwell an houre, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity." From Vaughan's book, Silex Scintillans, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, come his best-known things. The precious little volume is dated 1650, the year after Robert Herrick gave his golden Hesperides to the world; thus yielding proof that, as to the Devonshire vicarage came no rumble of the Cromwell cannon, so the clangors of those tragic days were unheard in the village of South Wales where Henry Vaughan me4itated his holy and contented muse. Like most Welsh youth of the gentler class, our poet attended Jesus College, Oxford. His family was an ancient one; two of his ancestors laid down their lives at Agincourt, and two of the family figure in Shakespeare's historical plays. The young poet, then, would find the way open for him to Oxford's choicest company; indeed, he seems to have matched verses with the university wits, for we find among his earlier songs the usual protestations to Amoret, to Fida, and to Etesia. Fida's eyes, he de- clares, are "like twinkling stars," her breath "as sweet as new-blown roses." To Etesia he sings, with premoni- tions of his rare later fancy, — [53] Brandy wine Days "Thou art the dark world's raorning-star, Seen only, and seen but from far; Where, like astronomers, we gaze Upon the glories of thy face." Vaughan's book is one for reading in quiet hours of summer mornings, in rose-bowered arbors or under green willows beside a cool stream. Thus it is that I turn now and then to this old-world book of the Welsh poet. [54] NATURE^S HEALING JULY II ''Above all vocal sons of men. To Wordsworth be my homage, thanks, and love,'* V^^HE tired city and the hot-breathed streets, V^V The little children sad and wistful-eyed, Pale, weary mothers, all the hopeless throng That crowd the stifling courts and alleys dark, Cheated of beauty, doomed to toil and plod Year in, year out, in endless poverty And seemingly forgotten of their God, — These passed from sight but not from memory, As forth I journeyed by wide-spreading lawns And lavish homes of luxury, and saw Extravagance, display, and worldly pomp. And joyless people striving hard for joy. I grieved for those sad children and the throngs Pent in hot city walls; I grieved for these Unthinking devotees of pride and show. What medicine is there, what healing power, — I mused, — to calm and soothe these suffering hearts Stifled by poverty or dulled by wealth ? Is there no anodyne to heal them all. No gift from God to lift them and console And bring again the golden age to men ? Lo, turning to the loved and friendly page Of Wordsworth's book beside me on the grass [55] Brandywine Days By silver Brandywine's Arcadian stream, I read how "Nature never did betray The heart that loved her ; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy; for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues. Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life. Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings." [56] BOOK-HUNTING IN LONDON ''O to hunt books In the Charing Cross Road!" JULY VI HOOKING over my well-worn and best-loved old volumes this long rainy day, I am filled with many a memory of the places and times of ac- quiring these silent and faithful comrades. Those brought over-sea from book-shops in the Old World, — from Oxford and London, from the market-place in Verona, from ancient Strasburg, — possess their own charm. Most fascinating of all book-stalls are those of old London! There is indeed no winter of discontent for one who goes book-hunting in Holborn and Charing Cross Road. The fog may be dense and the street lamps dim at noon- day, but for him who plies the delightful quest of old volumes the soft yellow haze adds a glamor and seems to shut him up in his own little sphere in deepest con- tentment of heart. Very near to Charles Lamb did I feel while idling in Booksellers' Row in late wintry after- noons. This old thoroughfare — now unhappily *'im- proved" out of existence — lay somewhere near the route from the Temple to Christ's Hospital ; and I doubt not that the young Charles found himself often there as he passed from cloister to cloister. Along these antique streets and by-ways, where clustered old book stalls, Charles Lamb may have had his early taste for leather- clad folios made the keener. He had long before been tumbled into the spacious closets of good old English [57] Brandy wine Days reading in the library of Samuel Salt, Esq., and had browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pastur- age. In Booksellers' Row he might have found — as he later found at the Bodleian Library — the odor of old moth-scented coverings of folios and quartos as fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchards. Old Books are best! I confess to that belief. Why else did I put aside the prim little Shakespeares in their fresh green leather, in the showy Holborn shop, and buy the old Malone variorum edition of 1803 in Booksellers' Row? Books associate themselves for us with the places where we bought them and the places where we read them. These old Shakespeares forever recall that yellow fog and that ancient stall on a certain December after- noon. The notes may not discuss the latest German theory of Hamlet's madness, but they are delightfully ample and leisurely, covering mostly the greater part of the page; and their obsolete wisdom is always vouched for by Malone, or Johnson, or Steevens, or T. Warton, or other old-time editors. Hardly will you meet with such a world of quaint annotation, save in Dr. Furness' generous pages, where the droll, strange editors of the Eighteenth Century find so kindly a welcome. Old Books are best! I think it, as I inhale the fragrance of the stout pages and caress the tarnished tree-calf covers of these twenty-one worn volumes of Shakespeare's Plays. The folio of Spenser, whose epic Sir Walter Scott avowed he could read forever, and whom Lowell ranked along with Marlowe, his earliest favorite — Spen- ser's noble folio here on my desk has a singularly precious ' [58] Book-Hunting i?i London association connected with it, for it was bought imme- diately after I came from the stately funeral of Lord Tennyson. The linking of the two august poets in this way has meant an added joy in the persual of my copy of Spenser ever since that day. *'No writer ever found a nearer way to the heart than he," thought Theophilus Gibber. I hold myself a Spenserian; and fortified by Keats and Scott and Lowell and Gibber, I shall continue to cherish and applaud Spenser's noble idealism and un- matchable melody to the end. It is no mere fancy that makes those solemn services in the Abbey, and the dreamy hum of the old London streets — that **mery London," Spenser's "most kyndly nurse" — rise in memory in the happy summer hours that find me lingering over the "Shepheards Galender" or ''The Faerie Queene" in this treasureable volume. A few dollars will go a long way among London book- stalls. Little Eighteenth century editions of The Spec- tator, and of Pope and Gray and Gowper, may often be picked up for sixpence a volume. The flavor of antiquity clings to them; old names of former owners, and choice old faded book-plates, enrich the fly-leaves; the curious antiquated notes and the quaint type carry one back to the days of Queen Anne and the early Georges. One reads and reads these dear delightful books with a gusto that no recently published editions can ever give. ''By ?fiy troth, here's an excellent comfortable book; it's most sweet reading in it'' — how often may one ex- claim thus, with old Dekker! [59] **OLD FISHING AND WISHING'^ ''Then come, my friend, forget your foes, and leave your fears behind. And wander forth to try your luck, with cheerful, quiet mind; For be your fortune great or small, you II take what God may give. And all the day your heart shall say, ' 'Tis luck enough to live/" ^ ^ULY VII. Twenty years ago the Brandywine was ki- an excellent stream for bass-fishing, I well re- member the patient elderly anglers who would sit beneath our willows and watch their corks the day long, turning homeward at evenfall w^ith choice strings of Jaass. And when the stream was unusually clear, we could sp} these dark fish down in the cool water above the smooth sand-beds, Now v/innowing the water with clear gills, Now darting with a flash of purple fin Far into watery shades and silent homes Of willow roots beneath the sedgy bank, Or shadowy chambers in the sunless rocks. But, recently, the German carp have been introduced by some enterprizing citizens, and as a result the bass have yielded ground, or, rather, water, — to the intruders. Save for "them six big bass" that an ancient villager boasts of having "ketched" in the stream last summer, I have not heard of a haul of these fine and lamented beauties for [60] ''Old Fishmg and Wishing' many a day. The carp have the Brandywine almost to themselves, and we can see them, — large w^hitish fellows, — vaulting out of the water daily. But are the carp ogres among the fish tribes, driving out the finer sorts? I can fancy the alarm of the young fall-fish and the baby bass when one of these big-eyed, leathery monsters comes sweep- ing in among their innocent schools. How they must flee in consternation to their mothers' sheltering fins! So I think that, with the coming in of the carp and the going out of the bass, we have fallen on evil days. Yet one cannot but feel some tenderness for the in- truders, when he fin4s honest Walton averring that "the Carp is a stately, a good, and a subtle fish, a fish that hath not (as it is said) been long in England but said to be by one Mr. Mascall (a Gentleman then living at Pluinsted in Sussex) brought into this Nation." Rambling along agreeably with his carp-lore, the gen- tle Izaak informs his pupil "that they breed more nat- urally in Ponds then in running waters, and that those that live in Rivers are taken by men of the best palates to be much the better meat." The carp is by all odds the most considerable and stately of our Brandywine fish ; not even our old villager's generous imagination can raise a bass to the proportions of a full-grown carp. In triumph let me quote from the Compleat Angler in support of my statement to doubting relatives as to the "great and goodly fish" I saw leaping and lunging in the shallows the other day: — "The Carp, if he have water room and good feed, will grow to a very great bigness and length: I have heard, to above a yard long; though I never saw one above thirty [61J Brandy wine Days three inches, which was a very great and goodly fish." Ah, dear old Piscator, of what a *'tryed honestie" dost thou approve thyself in thy cautious phrase "I have heard" ! Walton, naively enough, recommends "hope and pa- tience" to the angler for carp: — "I have knowne a very good Fisher angle diligently four or six hours in a day, for three or four dayes together for a River Carp, and not have a bite." What a picture arises at the words, — philosophic old men dozing beside their poles under shady willows, seem- ing a veritable part of the sleepy Sussex or Staffordshire landscape itself! Few such long-enduring anglers, it is to be feared, would old Izaak discover on our side of the Atlantic, unless he could perchance awake in some such quiet corner as one of our Brandywine valleys. Of baits for the carp there be many, says he, "of worms I think the blewish Marsh or Meadow worm is best." But the fisherman who hunts vainly for a worm of the proper "blewish" tint, may find comfort in Pisca- tor's generous alternative, — "but possibly another worm not too big may do as well, and so may a Gentle; and as for Pastes, there are almost as many sorts as there are Medicines for the Toothach." And for our Brandywine carp-fishers, — degenerates from the good old bass-days! — let me give Walton's clos- ing counsel, — which I have always thought one of the gems from his "sweet Socratic lip": — "And if you fish for a Carp with Gentles, then put upon your hook a small piece of Scarlet about this bigness n , it being soked in, or anointed with Oyle of Peter, called by some, Oyl of the Rock; and if your Gentles [62J ''Old Fishing and JVishing' be put two or three dayes before Into a box or horn anointed with Honey, and so put upon j^our hook, as to preserve them to be living, you are as like to kill this craftie fish this way as any other; but still as you are fish- ing, chaw a little white or brown bread in your mouth, and cast it into the Pond about the place where your flote swims. Other baits there be, but these with dili- gence, and patient watchfulness, will do it as well as any as I have ever practised, or heard of; and yet I shall tell you, that the crumbs of white bread and honey made into a Paste, is a good bait for a Carp, and you know it is more easily made." O for the sweet, serene philosophy of this long-dead "Brother of the Angle," who basked contentedly in the sunshine and had a *'pitie" for "poor-rich men," "men that are condemn'd to be rich, and always discontented, or busie"! How few of us to-day can say, with this old Seventeenth-Century sage, that "we enjoy a contented- nesse above the reach of such dispositions" ! *'What trout shall coax the rod of yore In Itchen stream to dip? What lover of her banks restore That siveet Socratic lip? Old fishing and 'wishing Are over many a year." Thus wrote Louise Imogen Guiney, whose affinity for Walton and Vaughan and other worthies of the old Cav- alier days makes her their "verie fitte" interpreter. If I add a paragraph that has naught to do with my theme, — the Carp, — I may plead the example of that de- [63] Bra?tdywine Days lightful follower of side-paths, Charles Lamb. I cannot refrain from copying out of my Compleat Angler (a port- ly little volume, secured from that last of old-fashioned book-sellers, Bernard Quaritch, in Piccadilly) a presenta- tion-letter which I found in the Bodleian Library copy of the fifth edition ( 1676) of Walton's quaint book. "For Mrs. Wallop "I think I did some years past lend you a booke of Angling: This is printed since and I think better; And because nothing that I can pretend a tytell too, can be too good for you pray accept of this also, from me that am really ''Madam "Yor most affectionate friend "And, most humble servant "Izaak Walton." [64] OLD HILLS MY BOYHOOD KNEW JULY VIII I HOULD I not hold them dear, These harvest-laden hills around me here, Old hills my boyhood knew, Green hills beneath what skies of blue ! — Hills looking over fields with deep peace crowned, Peaceful, beloved, ancestral ground. Who would not count it joy To roam the hills he roamed a happy boy! II Far off I see the men among the wheat; The ox-teams, patient, slow; The heavy sheaves piled up in yellow row; I hear the field-lark's carol sweet, The blackbird's gipsy call; I see the tasselled corn-fields smile For mile on emerald mile, And cattle browsing under oak-trees tall In meadows starred with tender flowers. The long rich summer hours Are none too long on this green height, Beneath these gnarled old cherry trees Where many a charming sight Enchants me, — where the balmy breeze, [65] Brandywine Days This dreamy summer day, Comes odorous from hills of hay And fields of ripening oats, — Where great cloud-shadows slowly pass Across the waving grass, — Where upward from the valley softly floats The song of children wading there In plashing waters silvery and cool, Like oreads beside a forest pool With dark and streaming hair. Ill Across the landscape with low drowsy song And golden flash and gleam, Behold how happily our winding stream, Our Stream of Beauty, flows along! — Now under pendent boughs of silent woods 'Mid leafy solitudes. Now rushing over rocks set long ago By Indian anglers in gigantic row. Now flowing w^here the flossy heifers feed And white sheep nibble slow In many a deep-grassed solitary mead. Now winding under willow-bordered banks Where lilies grow in yellow ranks And water-weeds nod o'er the placid stream Wrapt all in sleepy dream. IV O these are sights to make the pulses glow, To touch with magic power, [fi6] Old Hills My Boyhood Ki ?iew To waken memories of long ago And many a long-lost summer hour! — Old harvest-laden hills around me here, Should I not hold you dear, Old hills my boyhood knew, Green hills beneath those skies of blue! [67J THE CHILDREN "All heaven hath dreamed and smiled In the sweet face of a child/' ^ — I'ULY IX. "Put the children into your Hour- \^' Glass," urges my Celtic friend, he whose heart is ever tender towards his own and all other win- some little folk. Yes, I reply, — but can you tell me by what magic one can express a tithe of the sunshine and charm and ineffable loveliness of childhood? "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," says the magnificent Ode over whose creation Wordsworth pondered for well-nigh the Horatian period. Surely, we must leave to Blake and Wordsworth and Stevenson the portrayal of the eternal joy and artlessness of the child- heart. The sweet seriousness and unconscious depth of char- acter so often seen in the clear faces of children have at- tracted many a poet's wonder. Dinah Mulock Craik has described "A Child's Smile", — "A child's smile, — nothing more; Quiet, and soft, and grave, and seldom seen. Like summer lightning o'er, Leaving the little face again serene." And how quaint and bonny is this stanza from Hugh Miller's Scotch poem, ''The Babie"! [68] T'he Child?^en "Her een sae like her mither's een, Twa gentle, liquid things; Her face is like an angel's face — We're glad she has nae wings!" This beautiful ethical view of child-life, that sees the innocent soul shining through the little wistful face, dates from a century ago, when Wordsworth, radiant with spiritual vision and all the freshness of high poetic youth, was giving forth his exquisite lines in portrayal of real or ideal maidenhood, — "Her's the silence and the calm Of mute, insensate things!" — "Beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face;" — "She seem'd a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years;" — "A face with gladness overspread; Soft smiles, by human kindness bred;" — lines, it seems to me, matchless for their simple beauty and spiritual pathos. Yet matchless as they are, they find no mean echo in the utterance of later singers, as when Lowell writes of his daughter, — "I know not how others saw her, But to me she was wholly fair, And the light of the heaven she came from Still lingered and gleamed in her hair," — or when Frederick Locker thus addresses his winsome child: [69] Brandywine Days "Your calm, blue eyes have a far-off reach. Look at me with those wondrous eyes. Why are we doomed to the gift of speech While you are silent and sweet and wise? You have much to learn; you have more to teach, Baby mine." So with scores of simple and tender lyrics of childhood. One could fill many a page with the fair little child-songs of old Herrick, the whimsical fantasies of Lewis Carroll, the sadly beautiful threnodies of Elizabeth Chapman for a lost boy. Charles Tennyson-Turner's sonnet should not be forgotten, telling how little Letty fondly patted her toy globe, — "And while she hid all England with a kiss, Bright over Europe fell her golden hair;" — nor that grave, sweet elegy of our American laureate of childhood, James Whitcomb Riley, — "And this is the way the baby Flept; A mist of tresses backward thrown By quivering sighs where kisses crept With yearnings she had never known ; The little hands were closely kept About a lily newly blown And God was with her. And we wept — And this is the way the baby slept." Here, by the old flag-paven porch, sits little Brown- Eyes, blowing bubbles; she is enthralled by the perfect spheres of iridescent film that float so faerily from the pipe, hover an instant, and then fail into nothingness. The evanescence of these strangely fascinating water-balls is an emblem of the charm of children's ways, their tears [70] The Children and smiles that chase each other like the rains and suns of April. Last evening, in the gathering twilight, I watched a bonny little maiden and her blue-eyed cousins flitting among the evergreens and the half-shut roses. Like spir- its they seemed in the shadowy air, ethereal forms, — like those of which the Greeks dreamed, and which people the silvery glades of Corot's forest-sides. At last, wearied with their frolic, they came and asked for a story, — they who had been acting there, with sweet grace and abandon, a Greek pastorale of thirty centuries ago, — calling poor me from my reverie and seeking the consolation of a twilight tale that could be to their innocent drama but as clay to fine gold ! Ah, little ones, what unsuspected power and fascination is yours! And now in the sweet shadowy hour they troop off to- wards the house, like homing birds seeking the nest, and they are chanting as they go the favorite song of little Bunny, — the jocund refrain of Autolycus, — "Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way, And merrily hent the stile-a ; A merry heart goes all the day. Your sad tires in a mile-a." [71] OLD-TIME ECLOGUES "And asked who thee forth did bring, A shepheards swaine, saye, did thee sing All as his straying flocke he fedde." ^ — J'ULY X. Looking over some notes of browsings ffM- among the pastoral poets of England, I revive this afternoon my devotion to the earlier eclogues; and mine ancient friend Barnabe Googe seems to sound his rural pipes among our green Brandyvv^Ine meadows. Some sixteen years before Spenser, prince of the pasto- ral muse, made use of the term "eclogue," It was appro- priated by Googe, whose own quaint name smacks of home- ly shepherding and rustic revelry. In his engaging little book, Eglogs, EpytapheSj and Sonnettes, of 1563, our Bar- nabe writes with old-fashioned joy In country comforts, as In this very charming shepherd avowal : "Menalcas best we nowe departe, my Cottage us shall keepe, For there is rowme for the, and me, and eke for all our sheepe: Som Chestnuts have I there in store with Cheese and pleasaunt whaye, God sends me Vittayles for my nede, and I synge Care awaye." Ere yet the silver Avon knew the boy Shakespeare and his love for the Idyllic countryside, Barnabe Googe was sounding his tuneful oat and essaying his old-world melo- dies by Lincolnshire fields and hedgerows. And with all [72] Id-Time Eclogues his English rural flavor, he was not forgetful of the nomenclature of the ancient bucolic poets, for his eight ''Eglogs" yield such old familiar shepherd names as Daphnes, Amintas, Dametas, Menalcas, Melibeus, Corl- don, Silvanus, — an Arcadian company, surely! The elaborate and delightful recording of rustic de- bates and meditations, which renders so memorable a charm In Edmund Spenser's pastorals, harks back to the earlier and simpler poet. Thus the venerable Amintas, in Egloga Prima, closes his homely discourse in this wise: "And thus an end, I weryed am, my wynde is olde, and faynt; Such matters I do leave to suche, as finer farre can paint, Fetche in the Gote that goes astraye, and dryve hym to the folde. My yeares be great, I wyl be gone, for spryngtyme nyghts be colde." [73] OXFORD'S IDEALIST He loved the comeliness upon the face Of things, their excellence and grace, — Old memoried mansions, rippling wheat, The eyes of little children wistful-sweet. The vesper-songs in Oxford's stately nave ; He cherished recollections of still hours Of musing in grey old-world shrines Or reading his loved poets 'mid the vines And honey-hearted flowers Of Oxford's slumbrous gardens; and he gave Deep utterance to these in perfect speech Such as the Greeks alone might reach, — Moving with music, golden-sweet of tone, Glowing like some rich stone, — A speech that may not be Surpassed in charm or high felicity. ^^ — I'ULY XL Walter Pater discoursing on Raphael ffM* in Oxford on a summer evening, — I can never forget his dreamy, absorbed manner, his measured half-chanting of his sentences, — sentences with such a flavor! — as thus: ''Yet Plato, as you know, supposed a kind of visible loveliness about ideas. Well! in Raphael, painted ideas, painted and visible philosophy, are for once as beautiful as Plato thought they must be, if one truly apprehended them." [74] Oxford' s Idealist From that day to this I have dwelt under the spell of a master of no ordinary power and charm, a master who through all his pages, — whether he revive with fresh glory the pure, calm faith of the old Greeks, or the strange, rich life of the middle ages; whether he report his vivid impressions of an ancient Norman church or of a centu- ried and fragrant London garden, or of a band of athletic youth beside the Thames at Oxford, — through all his beautiful discourse, cherishes and preaches the passion for perfection. As I look over his well-beloved books to-day, here in the tranquil shade of the oaks, beside the low-murmuring Brandywine, — I realize afresh that Walter Pater was one who drew disciples about him, and made them for all time the lovers and champions of goodness and of beauty, by force of a "sweet attractive kind of grace" that distin- guished the man and his words. Like many of the most successful of teachers, Walter Pater made little direct appeal to noble living; rather, he preferred to uphold a comely idealism by his devoted interpretation of the best in art and letters and human conduct. He was beloved by the finer strain of Oxford students; to their youthful enthusiasms he offered a distinct fascination in all that he spoke or wrote. Amid the controversies of noisier studies Pater followed a peaceful path apart, and drew around him the elect souls of each new generation of students. A sort of latter-day Plato, he seemed, truly; and like that first of idealists and prophets of beauty, he left behind him a circle of followers who cherish his memory as some- thing fragrant and consecrated. At a university where polemics and theology and politics clamored for the stu- [75] Brandywine Days dents' attention, it was no small thing, wrote an editor at Pater's death, in 1894, "to have a scholar who stead- fastly taught the beauty and excellence of literature adorned by art, and of art enlightened by literature for their own sakes alone." Surely, of all places in the world, ancient Oxford seems the high home of Idealism; and in the last two generations Walter Pater has been Oxford's Idealist par excellence. It was of Oxford that one of Pater's student-friends sang: "There Shelley dreamed his white Platonic dreams; There classic Landor throve on Roman thought; There Addison pursued his quiet themes; There smiled Erasmus, and there Colet taught. "That is the Oxford, strong to charm us yet; Eternal in her beauty and her past. What though her soul be vexed? She can forget Cares of an hour; only the great things last. "Only the gracious air, only the charm, And ancient might of true humanities ; These, nor assault of man, nor time, can harm; Not these, nor Oxford with her memories. "Think of her so ! the wonderful, the fair, The immemorial, and the ever young: The city sweet with our forefathers' care ; The city where the Muses all have sung." How did Walter Pater inculcate his idealism? Chiefly through biography — through biography, spiritualized and glorified for his beautiful purpose, it may be, but always portraying some real or imagined youth ardently seeking for perfection. Thus it is for youth that Pater holds his [76] Oxford' s Idealist special charm, and for the youthful in every heart. A peculiarly lovable author he becomes to those who learn to know him aright, to be cherished as Sidney and Shelley and Keats are cherished, as Wordsworth and Emerson are cherished, for sake of the messages conveyed by these noble spirits in language of incomparable power and beauty. "Interpreter of beauty, he revealed Some subtler shade of unimagined grace In all the lo