NRLF 
 

LANDSCAPE 
 
 IN 
 
 AMERICAN POETRY 
 
 BY 
 
 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS ON WOOD FROM DRAWINGS BY J. APPLETON BROWN. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 
 549 & 551 BROADWAY. 
 
COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 U. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 1879. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ENGRAVED BY MESSRS, ANTHONY, LIN TON, HARLEY, LAUDER- 
 BACH, BOBBETT, AND ANDREWS. 
 
 WHITTIER S BROOK ..... Frontispiece. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 &quot; The Charles his steel-blue sickle crooks &quot; .... 7 
 
 Hampton Meadows . . . . . . . u 
 
 The Merrimack and Powow . . . . . .15 
 
 Murmuring Brooks . . . . . . . 19 
 
 &quot;The new moon s modest bow&quot; . . . . . .21 
 
 &quot; Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom &quot; . . . . 24 
 
 &quot; The hills are still, the woods are dumb.&quot; 
 
 &quot; When the fresh winds make love to flowers &quot; . . .27 
 
 &quot; But who shall bide thy tempest ? &quot; . . . . 30 
 
 &quot; The frolic architecture of the snow &quot; . . . -33 
 
 . . . Cheshire s haughty hill &quot;..... 37 
 
 The ro^-like pine-roots crosswise grown &quot; . . . .40 
 
&quot;By sunken reefs the hoarse sea roars&quot; .... 43 
 
 &quot; Gaunt shadows stretch along the hill &quot; . . . .46 
 
 &quot; It touched the wood-bird s folded wing .... 47 
 
 Upon the headland height . . . . . 51 
 
 &quot; The darting swallows soar and sing &quot; .... 54 
 
 &quot; Myriad twittering swallows &quot; . . . . -57 
 
 &quot; O blossoms that hang like winter &quot; . . . . 60 
 
 &quot; The black shadows fall &quot; . . . . * .62 
 
 &quot;..-.. The great wheel that toils amid the hurry 
 
 And rushing of the flume &quot; . . . . . 65 
 
 &quot; . . . . Some woodland gap.&quot; 
 
 &quot; Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet &quot; . . . .68 
 
 &quot; Through the green lanes of the country &quot; 
 
 &quot; . . . . Some neglected graveyard &quot; . . . . 71 
 
 &quot;The rising moon has hid the stars&quot; . . . . 75 
 
 &quot; Hark ! from the moss-clung apple-bough &quot; . . . 78 
 
 &quot; Tis a woodland enchanted!&quot; 81 
 
 i 
 
 &quot; . . . . Athwart the windy hill &quot;..... 84 
 
 &quot; As a twig trembles, which a bird 
 
 Lights on to sing.&quot; 
 &quot; As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven, 
 
 The blue dome s measureless content.&quot; 
 
 &quot; The orchards full of bloom and scent &quot; 88 
 
&quot; Where Artichoke in shadow slides &quot; . . . . QI 
 
 &quot; The woodlands wore a gloomy green &quot; 04 
 
 &quot; . . . . Where the crimson phloxes burn.&quot; 
 
 &quot; So bleak these shores &quot; g7 
 
 &quot; I lie in the summer meadows &quot;...., Ioo 
 
 &quot; The jessamine hangs golden flowers.&quot; 
 
 &quot; The coast-land of our Western Italy &quot; . . . I0 ^ 
 
 &quot; .... A maze of sluggish and devious waters &quot; . . .107 
 
 &quot;White clouds, whose shadows haunt the deep&quot; . IIO 
 
 &quot; The tall pines bowing where they stand.&quot; 
 
 &quot;Afar the bright Sierras lie &quot; . . . t l{ ^ 
 
 &quot;Gone has Spring, with all its flowers&quot; . . . . n^ 
 
 &quot;The turfy path with fern and flowers inwove&quot; . . . 120 
 
 &quot; . . . . Tis autumn now 
 
 On field and hill&quot; . . . . . . .123 
 

 
 &quot; The Charles his steel-blue sickle crooks. 
 
 I. 
 
 I ^HE house in which a great poet has lived always interests 
 
 us, but it can not hold so much of his life as the trees 
 
 through which his thoughts have made ^Eolian melodies, or the 
 
 roadsides along which his imaginations have blossomed into song. 
 
 And the magic of poetry transfigures any landscape, making 
 
8 
 
 it beautiful beyond itself as immeasurably as the ideal transcends 
 the real. 
 
 The majestic wraith of Shakespeare glorifies the Avon, and 
 the Ayr and the Doon are not so musical with their own rip 
 ples as with the ballads of Robert Burns. Through the songs 
 of our own singers, also, we are beginning to see the beauty of 
 the country in which we live. Our artists have already done 
 much toward showing the world what American landscape is 
 like, but by the aid of our poets they will do yet more ; for 
 what is the artist s hand without the poet s eye and soul ? As 
 they approach their perfect idea, Art and poetry are one. 
 
 American poetry is abundantly picturesque. 
 
 To begin with what may be considered the classic ground 
 of our national minstrelsy who, that is familiar with the verse 
 of Lowell and Longfellow, does not know something of the 
 scenery of the river Charles ? 
 
 The latter invokes the spirit of the stream with the words 
 
 Thou hast been a generous giver, 
 I can give thee but a song : 
 
 And, through the long regret of love in the heart of the singer, 
 its shores are haunted with shadowy presences of never-to-be- 
 forgotten friends. As thus : 
 
 .... A dreamy haze 
 
 Hangs o er the Brighton meadows like a fate, 
 And on their margins with sea-tides elate, 
 The flooded Charles, as in the happier days, 
 Writes the last letter of his name, and stays 
 His restless steps, as if compelled to wait. 
 
I also wait, but they will come no more, 
 Those friends of mine, whose presence satisfied 
 The thirst and hunger of my heart. Ah me ! 
 
 They have forgotten the pathway to my door ! 
 
 The poetry of Lowell is luminous with the ever-returning 
 gleam of this same quiet river. It is the mirror of his most 
 delicate fancies, and he has given us its scenery in exquisite 
 word-painting. In the &quot;Indian-Summer Reverie &quot;- 
 
 .... A stripe of nether sky, 
 It- 
 Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green. 
 
 And the lover of the river is also the lover of the sea-marshes 
 through which it flows : 
 
 Dear marshes ! vain to him the gift of sight, 
 Who can not in their various incomes share, 
 
 From every season drawn, of shade and light; 
 Who sees in them but levels brown and bare. 
 
 All round, upon the river s slippery edge, 
 
 Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, 
 Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge. 
 
 And there are 
 
 The wide-ranked mowers, wading to the knee, 
 
 Their sharp scythes panting through the thick-set grass. 
 
 There, too 
 
10 
 
 .... The bobolink, 
 Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops 
 
 Just as he sweeps o er rapture s tremulous brink, 
 And twixt the winrows most demurely drops. 
 
 This poem is, indeed, a succession of inimitable pictures. 
 Again, in &quot; An Invitation &quot; 
 
 The Charles his steel-blue sickle crooks, 
 
 Where a twin sky had just before 
 
 Deepened, and double swallows skimmed ; 
 And from a visionary shore 
 Hung visioned trees, that more and more 
 Grew dusk, as those above were dimmed. 
 
 And again, following our poet to his retreat &quot; Under the 
 Willows,&quot; we are shown where 
 
 .... The sliding Charles, 
 
 Blue toward the west, and bluer and more blue, 
 Living and lustrous as a woman s eyes, 
 Look once, and look no more, with southward curve 
 Ran crinkling sunniness, like Helen s hair 
 Glimpsed in Elysium, insubstantial gold. 
 
 .... The deep meadows flowed 
 With multitudinous pulse of light and shade 
 Against the bases of the southern hills, 
 While here and there a drowsy island-rick 
 Slept, and its shadow slept. 
 
II 
 
 Lowell is not too eloquent regarding the pastoral charm of 
 our marsh-scenery. On the Mystic and the Saugus one loses 
 the elm-shadowed verdure of the Charles, but has, instead in 
 the right season the shaven gold of the salt-meadows widening 
 with bronzed ricks to the open sea, that rims them with deepest 
 ultramarine. This is the view of the traveler along the railways 
 running eastward from Boston to Nahant. And the region is 
 
 &quot; Hampton meadows, where mowers lay 
 Their scythes to the swaths of salted grass.&quot; 1 
 
 not without its poetic associations, although in &quot; The Bridal of 
 Pennacook &quot; the tameness of its winter aspect is purposely brought 
 out in contrast with the forest-wildness of the Upper Merrimack. 
 There the marshes are described as- 
 Dull, dreary flats, without a bush or tree, 
 
 O ercrossed by icy creeks, where twice a day 
 Gurgle the waters of the moon-struck sea. 
 
12 
 
 But even these flats may be seen with a difference on a clear, 
 crisp, autumnal day, or with their long sea-fringe lying illumined 
 under a cloud-flecked sunrise. 
 
 Farther eastward the Rowley, and Salisbury, and Hampton 
 meadows gain immensely in breadth, and their oak-islets and 
 promontories, and woodbine-wreathed rocks, agreeably vary the 
 vast level of hay-ricks stretching oceanward. These are the 
 
 Low, green prairies of the sea, 
 which so frequently form the background of Whittier s poems : 
 
 Hampton meadows, where mowers lay 
 Their scythes to the swaths of salted grass ; 
 
 and where, moving hither and thither on the horizon, with the 
 windings of the country road 
 
 Agamenticus lifts its blue 
 
 Disk of a cloud the woodlands o er. 
 
 Approaching them from their farthest inland border, you catch 
 the glimmer of 
 
 A luminous belt, a misty light, 
 
 Beyond the dark pine-bluffs and wastes of sandy gray ; 
 The tremulous shadow of the sea ! 
 
 And this is the way the poet outlines for us the landscape 
 from the adjacent beaches : 
 
13 
 
 Behind them marshes, seamed and crossed 
 With narrow creeks, and flower-embossed, 
 Stretched to the dark oak-wood, whose leafy arms 
 Screened from the stormy east the pleasant inland farms. 
 
 At full of tide their bolder shore 
 
 Of sun- bleached sand the waters beat : 
 At ebb, a smooth and glittering floor 
 
 They touched with light, receding feet. 
 Northward a green bluff broke the chain 
 Of sand-hills ; southward stretched a plain 
 Of salt grass, with a river winding down, 
 Sail-whitened, and beyond, the steeples of the town. 
 
 Whence, sometimes, when the wind was light, 
 
 And dull the thunders of the beach, 
 They heard the bells of morn and night 
 Swing, miles away, their silver speech. 
 Above low scarp and turf-grown wall, 
 They saw the fort-flag rise and fall ; 
 And, the first star to signal twilight s hour, 
 The lamp-fire glimmer down from the tall lighthouse-tower. 
 
 Retracing our steps from the Hampton and Salisbury 
 marshes, up the lower waters of the Merrimack, we are tread 
 ing upon ground which is all a-bloom with the poetry of Whit- 
 tier. The breezy seaside city of Newburyport, and the neighbor 
 ing hills of Amesbury, and Haverhill, and old Newbury, are 
 almost as well known to us as the ideal and historical person 
 ages with which his songs have peopled this whole region. In 
 &quot; Mabel Martin,&quot; in &quot; Snow-Bound,&quot; and in many traditionary 
 ballads, and verses relating to personal friendships, the familiar 
 
landscape reappears. We know the look of the tranquil valley 
 of the Merrimack from his native hillsides, nearly as well as the 
 poet himself. How should we not, when he has sketched it dis 
 tinctly ? as thus : 
 
 I see, far southward, this quiet day, 
 
 The hills of Newbury rolling away 
 
 With the many tints of the season gay, 
 
 Dreamily blending in autumn mist, 
 
 Crimson, and gold, and amethyst. 
 
 Long and low, with dwarf-trees crowned, 
 
 Plum Island lies like a whale a-ground, 
 
 A stone s toss over the narrow sound. 
 
 Inland, as far as the eye can go, 
 
 The hills curve round like a bended bow : 
 
 A silver arrow from out them sprung, 
 
 I see the shine of the Quasycung : 
 
 And round and round, over valley and hill, 
 
 Old roads winding, as old roads will, 
 
 Here to a ferry, and there to a mill. 
 
 The grandeur of mountain-tops, of wild cascades, and ava 
 lanche-piled ravines, is not unknown to American poetry ; but 
 the portrayal of simpler surroundings of every-day life has formed 
 the true bond of attachment between singer and listener. To 
 feel that we have a birthright in common with our poets to 
 landscapes which their touch has transfigured, is more to us than 
 to dream of far-off magnificences of Nature, whither we may 
 seldom escape from the trodden pathways of daily toil. Few 
 spots in New England are wholly without an uplift and an out 
 look for the thought of the dreamer, in his brief interludes of 
 
,HiWA. .,r 
 
 r / 
 y 
 
 &quot; 
 
 
 mm 
 
 \-f. KS 
 
 i! 
 
 / 
 
 The Merrimack and Poivow. 
 
 leisure, be it only 
 a gap in the low 
 western hills, the 
 gleam of sunset up 
 on a work - a - day 
 mill-pond, or a misty sugges 
 tion of the sea. And there is 
 no glamour like that which, in 
 her best moods, Nature weaves 
 
16 
 
 over a scene to which our eyes have always been accus 
 tomed : 
 
 The hills are dearest which our childish feet 
 Have climbed the earliest ; and the streams most sweet 
 Are ever those at which our young lips drank, 
 Stooped to the waters o er the grassy bank. 
 
 And here for we were lingering on the banks of the Merri- 
 mack we are led by our artist to the borders of its tributary, 
 the Powow, that winds, beautiful, with Indian name and legend, 
 among gentians and alders, around the base of its namesake hill, 
 near the almost lifelong home of Whittier, in the busy little 
 town of Amesbury. It is a poetic stream in itself, with its 
 meadowy sinuosities, its shy withdrawals, and unexpected return- 
 ings to sight ; much more so through association with the genius 
 of this most characteristic singer of New England. 
 
 From almost any elevation about the village we might say 
 
 I see the winding Powow fold 
 The green hill in its belt of gold. 
 
 On its downward way it sets in motion the wheels and looms 
 of the woolen-mills, yet, even in the noisiest locality, does not 
 wholly divest itself of rural attractiveness, or the color of ro 
 mance. Its meanderings receive a human interest, in the poet s 
 lines, even from the passing footsteps of a tired working- 
 woman : 
 
 And still, in the summer twilights, 
 
 When the river seems to run 
 Out from the inner glory, 
 
 Warm with the melted sun. 
 
17 
 
 The weary mill-girl lingers 
 
 Beside the charmed stream ; 
 And the sky and the golden waters 
 
 Shape and color her dream. 
 
 On the bridge over the Powow, at its junction with the 
 Merrimack, more is to be seen than the contrasted beauty of 
 the two rivers. The spot is associated with the memory of the 
 poet s sister Elizabeth she of the 
 
 Large, sweet, asking eyes, 
 
 who shared her brother s peculiar gift, and has left in verse a 
 brief glimpse of herself standing here- 
 Watching how the little river 
 
 Fell into the broader stream ; . . . 
 
 And I thought, &quot; O human spirit, 
 Strong and deep and pure and blest, 
 
 Let the stream of my existence 
 
 Blend with thine, and find its rest ! &quot; 
 
 And the waters of the Powow and the Merrimack are not 
 more perfectly mingled than were those two poet-lives, now 
 known to the world only through him who yet moves among 
 us in the fullness of his honored years. 
 
 Still loitering up the valley of the Merrimack, under the 
 broad slope of cultivated hillsides, we reach the birthplace and 
 homestead of the poet, now passed into the hands of strangers, 
 and sadly changed from its old-time aspect of thrift and pictu- 
 resqueness. But the brook is there, flashing a suggestion of 
 
18 
 
 indignant regret from behind its low forest-shrubbery the brook 
 which the &quot; Barefoot Boy &quot; has told us of : 
 
 Laughed the brook for my delight 
 Through the day and through the night, 
 Whispering at the garden-wall, 
 Talked with me from fall to fall. 
 
 The brook remembered as a friend by the survivors of the 
 secluded fireside-circle in &quot; Snow-Bound &quot;- 
 
 The music of whose liquid lip 
 Had been to us companionship ; 
 And, in our lonely life, had grown 
 To have an almost human tone. 
 
 Is it not also the brook which glances along the gracefully rus 
 tic fancies of &quot;My Playmate&quot; and &quot;Telling the Bees&quot;? 
 
 This streamlet has a peculiar charm as having been the 
 playmate of a poet s childhood, and the accompanying music of 
 his earliest verses. But other rivulets blend with the current of 
 his singing ; and all poets have delighted to join their voices 
 with the melody of woodland streams. 
 
 Sweetest of all wild songs, and loveliest of all rural pictures, 
 are those a brook makes, descending the dim rock-paths of a 
 wooded cliff-side, or laughing and complaining through the sun 
 shine and shadows of poetry. A mountain-brook is itself a 
 poet. The river-infant springs with the gladness of a conscious 
 life from its cloud-curtained cradle- 
 Leaping gray walls of rock, flashing through the dwarf pine. 
 
 Which of our poets has best caught the spirit of the run- 
 
19 
 
 ning brooks it is not easy to say. Whether Whittier, among the 
 
 hills, when- 
 All the woods were sad with mist, 
 
 And all the brooks complaining ; 
 
 Murmuring Brooks. 
 
 or Bryant 
 
 Where Isar s clay-white rivulets run 
 Through the dark woods like frighted deer ; 
 
 or Longfellow 
 
 In the green valley, where the silver brook 
 From its full laver pours the white cascade, 
 And, babbling low amid the tangled woods, 
 Slips down through moss-grown stones with endless laughter ; 
 
2O 
 
 or Lowell, in the &quot; Woodland Enchanted,&quot; where the little 
 fount- 
 Slips winding and hiding 
 Through alder-stems mossy, 
 Through gossamer roots 
 
 Fine as nerves, 
 That tremble, as shoots 
 
 Through their magnetized curves 
 The allurement delicious 
 Of the water s capricious 
 
 Thrills, gushes, and swerves. 
 
 Every gentle or impetuous brooklet that flashes into light 
 from under its hemlocks and birches has an individuality a per 
 sonality, almost of its own. No least rivulet repeats another 
 rivulet s story, or mirrors the color and shadow of any life save 
 that of the trees, whose roots its sweet waters nourish, and 
 whose intergrowth of leafage it reflects. And each deserves its 
 own painter and laureate. 
 
 The brooks that we know in the songs of our poets that 
 ripple down past the threshold of our hearts through the soul 
 and the lips of genius make a gladness for us amid the blank 
 and dusty ways of life, a green retreat, whither our suffocating 
 fancies may at any moment escape. There is a human voice in 
 their murmur ; and, &quot; as in water face answereth unto face &quot;- 
 the reflex of a living presence the joy of a perennial friendship 
 is in their freshening flow. 
 
 Blessings, then, upon our mountain-brooks, and hundred-fold 
 blessings upon our poets, whose songs have made for them 
 
 A music sweeter than their own ! 
 
II. 
 
 The new moon s modest bow grows bright^ 
 As earth and sky grow dark.&quot; 
 
 \\ THEN the work of a great poet is completed, and it is 
 * * certain that from him we shall never have another 
 word-picture or song, everything he has left us rises to incalcu 
 lable preciousness. So is it now with the poetry of Bryant. 
 Always severely studied and artistically perfect, these very quali 
 ties sometimes prevented a reader from feeling the warm life 
 that throbbed under the careful finish of his style. His verse 
 
22 
 
 never seemed cold to those who gave it loving and reverent 
 s t uc [y the only means by which a real artist s work can be 
 understood. To others, it must now open like a new landscape, 
 reading it beneath the sacred illumination into which his memory 
 has passed, as one of the immortal dead. 
 
 Bryant was undoubtedly the first American poet who im 
 pressed his countrymen deeply with the charm of their own 
 native scenery. School-children of thirty or forty years since 
 were fortunate in having such poems as &quot; The Forest Hymn,&quot; 
 &quot; Monument Mountain,&quot; and &quot; June,&quot; among the selections in 
 their reading-books ; for these not only taught them to appreciate 
 exquisite rhythm, but awakened them to nature immediately 
 around them to the subtile changes of the seasons, as distinc 
 tively ours as any national peculiarity to the beauty of the shy 
 creatures that inhabit our woodlands ; to our own wild-flower 
 growths ; and to the wonder of our own forests, and mountains, 
 and prairies. 
 
 It was our own June, and not the foreign May-day of Eng 
 lish verse we had so long and so vainly attempted to naturalize 
 in our thoughts, that breathed through his lines- 
 Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom. 
 
 June, the queen-month of the year, shines with a tenderer ra 
 diance in the zodiac, since through her flowers the poet passed 
 for ever from our sight : 
 
 . . . Flowery June, 
 
 When brooks send up a cheerful tune, 
 And groves a joyous sound. 
 
 There is an undertone of pathos in this early poem ; the 
 
23 
 
 wish that has since become a fulfilled prophecy murmurs through 
 it, like the voice of a beautiful day foretelling its own end. 
 But Bryant s pictures of June are usually full of motion and 
 mirth. Was the spirit of the month ever so truthfully given as 
 in these inimitable lines ? 
 
 There s a dance of leaves in that aspen bower, 
 There s a titter of winds in that beechen tree, 
 
 There s a smile on the fruit and a smile on the flower, 
 And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea. 
 
 In another familiar poem we have the antithesis of August 
 and June a delicately wrought study, also, of contrasted anima 
 tion and repose, the distinctive characteristics of these two 
 months. It was a happy fancy of the artist, in illustrating the 
 verses, to place the quiet August scene where 
 
 The hills are still, the woods are dumb, 
 In glassy sleep the waters lie, 
 
 like a gem in its setting of breezy June blossoms. We can feel 
 even in winter the delicious stir of the season, as we look at the 
 sketch and read the words : 
 
 When the fresh winds make love to flowers, 
 And woodlands sing, and waters shout ; 
 
 When in the grass sweet voices talk, 
 And strains of tiny music swell 
 
 From every moss-cup of the rock, 
 And every nameless blossom s bell. 
 
 The poet has an advantage over the painter, in being able to 
 bring into his pictures that movement without some suggestion 
 
Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom. 
 
 of which a landscape is dead. Beneath the pen of Bryant, Na 
 ture is thoroughly alive. There is scarcely a mood of the winds 
 
25 
 
 that does not ripple or sweep across his pages. He makes us 
 
 see it 
 
 Rock the little wood-bird in his nest ; 
 
 Curl the still waters bright with stars, and rouse 
 The wide old wood from his majestic rest ; 
 
 or, breaking the vast stillness of the prairies into green undula 
 tions- 
 Toss the golden and the flame-like flowers. 
 
 But it is not the breeze alone that moves and has life in his 
 verse ; it is everything. It is the sudden rain darkening the air, 
 
 under which 
 
 Every leaf in all the woods 
 
 Is struck, and quivers ; 
 it is the climbing mountain-mist, that 
 
 Clings to the flowery kalmia, clings 
 
 To precipices fringed with grass, 
 Dark maples where the wood-thrush sings, 
 
 And bowers of fragrant sassafras ; 
 
 or it is the waterfowl fanning with his wings &quot; the cold, thin at 
 mosphere,&quot; where he floats along 
 
 Darkly seen against the crimson sky. 
 
 As magical is his use of tones. All autumn is with us again 
 
 in that 
 
 Soft, repining sound, 
 
 When forest-leaves are bright, 
 And fall, like flakes of light, 
 To the ground. 
 
26 
 
 It is the autumn breeze 
 
 That, lightly floating on, 
 Just skims the woody leas, 
 Just stirs the glowing trees, 
 
 And is gone, 
 And wanders on, to make 
 
 That soft, uneasy sound. 
 
 If Bryant does not always localize his pictures for us, no 
 poet has produced any so thoroughly American in their out-of- 
 door atmosphere. A foreigner may breathe the inmost spirit of 
 our Indian summer and latest autumn, in reading the &quot; Death 
 of the Flowers.&quot; Here again the year lends vivid suggestions 
 to the eye. The &quot; sound of dropping nuts &quot; and the sigh of the 
 south wind intensify the stillness, and a dreamy enchantment 
 clings to leafless boughs, and to the dim and scattered gold of 
 wild-wood flowers, while through the trance-like suffusion of earth 
 and air 
 
 Twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill. 
 
 With Bryant, the forest-blossoms grow up in their separate 
 beauty, each in its own place and season ; no imported lilies and 
 daisies, but the common native flowers that children know and 
 love the yellow violet and the squirrel-cup, the late aster, the 
 golden-rod, and the fringed gentian. 
 
 Yet there is not the least pettiness in these foreground 
 studies. The 
 
 . . . Delicate forest-flower 
 With scented breath, and look so like a smile, 
 
 leans out from dim vistas of the aboriginal wilderness, where 
 
27 
 
28 
 
 the footprints of deer and red-man are scarcely obliterated from 
 the sod, under 
 
 Old trees, tall oaks, and gnarled pines, 
 That stream with gray- green mosses. 
 
 And, for largeness of delineation, for that firm, clear touch 
 which seems to create a world in one sweeping outline, and 
 which belongs to the greatest artists only, Bryant is preeminent 
 among his brethren. In &quot; The Prairies,&quot; &quot; The Antiquity of 
 Freedom,&quot; and in many other poems, we have noble renderings 
 of our New World scenery : 
 
 Lone lakes savannas where the bison roves 
 
 Rocks rich with summer garlands solemn streams 
 Skies, where the desert eagle wheels and screams 
 
 Spring bloom, and autumn blaze of boundless groves. 
 
 When Bryant gives us a picture of the sea, it is character 
 ized by this same grandeur of handling the steady, gradual in 
 crease of power that we feel in the gathering waves themselves, 
 as they approach flood-tide. There is the bright, glancing, limit 
 less expanse, upon which eye and thought find themselves povv- 
 
 erlessly borne away : 
 
 ... I look .forth 
 
 Over the boundless blue, where joyously 
 The bright crests of innumerable waves 
 Glance to the sun at once, as when the hands 
 Of a great multitude are upward flung 
 In acclamation. 
 
 The picture changes from this scene of calm beauty to one 
 of tumult and storm : 
 
2 9 
 
 But who shall bide thy tempest, who shall face 
 The blast that wakes the fury of the sea ? 
 
 There is the fierce havoc of the hurricane among conflicting 
 
 armadas, when 
 
 . . . The vast hulks 
 
 Are whirled like chaff upon the waves ; the sails 
 Fly, rent like webs of gossamer ; the masts 
 Are snapped asunder. 
 
 And there is the dry land arising from the sea in the verse, 
 with the slow, patient certainty which characterizes the work of 
 the coral-architect : 
 
 . . . From age to age 
 He builds beneath the waters till, at last, 
 His bulwarks overtop the brine, and check 
 The long wave rolling from the southern pole 
 To break upon Japan. 
 
 In the poem called &quot; The Unknown Way,&quot; where the fancy 
 is led on without a clew, until the last stanza but one is reached, 
 there is more of sea-vastness than in pages of mere description. 
 Yet it is only a hint and a question : 
 
 Dost thou, O path of the woodland, 
 
 End where these waters roar, 
 Like human life, on a trackless beach, 
 
 With a boundless sea before ? 
 
 There is a sort of twilight tenderness in some of his more 
 delicately drawn pieces, in its way unequaled ; as in the lovely 
 evening sketch, where 
 
30 
 
 The new moon s modest bow grows bright, 
 As earth and sky grow dark. 
 
 &quot; But &quot;who shall bide thy tempest, who shall face 
 The blast that wakes the fury of the sea . ? &quot; 
 
 Through all Bryant s poetry we feel the presence of that 
 noble reserve which accompanies the highest art, that reticence 
 of genius which gives more in its wise withholding than in a too 
 
prodigal bestowing. He opens for us only now and then a 
 glimpse into his favorite haunts ; yet the Hudson, the Kaaters- 
 kill, and the groves and rivulets of his native hills, are impara- 
 dised for us in his poetry. 
 
 He is the landscape-painter among our poets, none of whom 
 seems to have lived always, as he, in close and secluded sympa 
 thy with Nature. His verse shows that, even through the years 
 which were given to business in the city, his heart was with her 
 in her most sequestered retirement. With what constancy and 
 devotion he loved her, and how graciously she rewarded him 
 with an intimacy of communion such as few know how to attain 
 and to keep, he has, in part, told us : 
 
 . , . The sunshine on my path 
 Was to me as a friend. The swelling hills, 
 The quiet dells retiring far between, 
 With gentle invitation to explore 
 Their windings, were a calm society 
 That talked with me and soothed me. While I stood 
 In Nature s loneliness, I was with one 
 With whom I early grew familiar, one 
 Who never had a frown for me, whose voice 
 Never rebuked me for the hours I stole 
 From cares I loved not, but of which the world 
 Deems highest, to converse with her. When shrieked 
 The bleak November winds, and smote the woods, 
 And the brown fields were herbless, and the shades 
 That met above the merry rivulet 
 
 Were spoiled, I sought, I loved them still ; they seemed 
 Like old companions in adversity. 
 Still there was beauty in my walks. 
 5 
 
32 
 
 The snowy woods are no less a delight to him : 
 
 When the slant sun of February pours 
 Into their bowers a flood of light. 
 
 And how perfect is that glimpse of the passing of winter 
 into spring ! 
 
 . . . When the noisy streams 
 Are just set free, and milder suns melt off 
 The plashy snow, save only the firm drift 
 In the deep glen, or the close shade of pines. 
 
 . . . Along the quiet air 
 
 Come and float calmly off the soft, light clouds, 
 Such as you see in summer, and the winds 
 Scarce stir the branches. Lodged in sunny cleft, 
 Where the cold breezes come not, blooms alone 
 The little wind-flower, whose just opened eye 
 Is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at 
 Startling the loiterer in the naked groves 
 With unexpected beauty. 
 
 For Nature, Bryant has no vain showering of epithets, no 
 tricks or coquetries, but the simplicity of a grave, faithful, un 
 swerving love, which sees and reveals her as she is, through in 
 sight given only to the pure in heart. 
 
 Nature is transparently herself in his verse : therefore it is 
 both satisfying and suggestive. And, therefore, while the beloved 
 poet, in passing from earth, leaves his place an unfilled blank, 
 his poetry must for ever remain to his countrymen among 
 the most precious of their possessions. 
 
III. 
 
 &quot; The frolic architecture of the snow, 1 
 
 I ^HE snow- scenery of our country has not been left unnoticed 
 
 by our poets. It has furnished a background for some 
 
 of their best ballads and lyrics, as well as a subject for excellent 
 
 descriptive pieces. Anything otherwise would be strange, since 
 
34 
 
 so many of the most celebrated among them have from their 
 birth breathed the air of the bleak hills and snow-laden ever 
 green woods of the northern United States. 
 
 The verse of Bryant, whose eye \vas open to every passing 
 phase of Nature, is full of pictures of this kind. His &quot; Winter 
 Piece,&quot; &quot; Snow-Shower,&quot; and that lovely phantasy, &quot; The Little 
 People of the Snow,&quot; have their acknowledged place as favor 
 ites ; nothing could be better in its way than his description of 
 Kaaterskill Falls in winter ; and Lowell, and Whittier, and Sted- 
 man, and Aldrich, and others, have given us some of their 
 choicest sketches in the neutral tints, and the clear, keen con 
 trasts of the frosty atmosphere in which we live so large a part 
 of the year. 
 
 The homeliness of our rural architecture does but enhance 
 the charm of our winter views. After a fresh fall of snow, the 
 weather-stained farmhouse or barn, although built according to 
 the plainest and most unsymmetrical of Puritanic models, takes 
 on a picturesqueness which no elegant uniformity of French 
 roofs is capable of receiving ; for Nature, working to the despair 
 of all other builders, can transform ugliness into beauty at her 
 will. 
 
 Come see the north-wind s masonry. 
 Out of an unseen quarry evermore 
 Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer 
 Curves his white bastions with projected roof 
 Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. 
 
 Mockingly 
 On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths, 
 
 And, when his hours are numbered, and the world 
 
35 
 
 Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, 
 Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art 
 To mimic in slow structures stone by stone, 
 Built in an age, the mad wind s night-work, 
 The frolic architecture of the snow. 
 
 With these lines from Emerson s &quot; Snow-Storm &quot; all lovers 
 of his poetry are familiar. We may parallel them with verses 
 from other writers. The changes wrought by light snow-drifts 
 upon the surroundings of a New England homestead, always 
 suggest something story-like and foreign, as in Lowell s &quot; First 
 Snow-Fail,&quot; the quaintness of &quot; sheds new-roofed with Carrara,&quot; 
 and in Whittier s &quot; Snow-Bound &quot; : 
 
 The well-curb had a Chinese roof: 
 And even the long sweep, high aloof, 
 In its slant splendor, seemed to tell 
 Of Pisa s leaning miracle. 
 
 And where is there so fairy-like a description of frost-scenery 
 as that in &quot; Sir Launfal,&quot; of the little brook s work under the 
 
 ice ? 
 
 All night, by the white stars frosty gleams, 
 He groined his arches and matched his beams ; 
 Slender and clear were his crystal spars 
 As the lashes of light that trim the stars. 
 He sculptured every summer delight 
 In his halls and chambers out of sight. 
 Sometimes his tinkling waters slipt 
 Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 
 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees 
 Bending to counterfeit a breeze. 
 
36 
 
 Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew 
 But silvery mosses that downward grew. 
 Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief 
 With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf. 
 
 Twas as if every image that mirrored lay 
 
 In his depths serene through the summer day, 
 
 Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, 
 
 Lest the happy model should be lost, 
 
 Had been mimicked in fairy-masonry 
 
 By the elfin builders of the frost. 
 
 But we willingly return, from even these pleasant digressions, 
 to the threshold of the Concord seer, where, as in hundreds of 
 
 Northern homes 
 
 . . . the house-mates sit 
 Around the radiant fireplace, inclosed 
 In a tumultuous privacy of storm. 
 
 We have no desire to intrude, and so break the charm, for 
 out of glowing seclusion like this comes often the noblest work 
 in art and letters. Not a few of the fairest pictures of summer 
 poet ever painted have doubtless been evoked from the depths 
 of his blazing hearth-fire, in wintry solitude. It would not be 
 surprising if that grandest mountain-poem we know of in Ameri 
 can verse Emerson s &quot; Monadnock &quot; shaped itself in this way. 
 The thought of the poet, following from his own fireside the 
 
 Thief-like step of liberal hours, 
 Thawing snow-drift into flowers 
 
 To twilight parks of beech and pine 
 High over the river intervals 
 
37 
 
 To see strange forests and new snow, 
 And tread uplifted land 
 
 points out to us a grander sum 
 mit than could be formed by 
 any Titanic upheaval of rock, 
 or age-long sculpturing of tor 
 rent and tempest. For his mind 
 joins its forces to the power 
 of the 
 
 hidden-working build 
 
 er 
 
 Who builds, yet makes no chips, no 
 
 din 
 With hammer soft as snow-flake s 
 
 flight. 
 
 Call not waste that barren 
 
 cone 
 
 Above the floral zone, 
 Where forests starve : 
 It is pure use. 
 
 These gray crags 
 
 Not on crags are hung ; 
 
 But beads are of a ro 
 sary 
 
 On prayer and music 
 strung. 
 
 Probably the ar 
 tist does not live 
 
 41 Ere yet the summoning voice was still, 
 I turned to Cheshire s haughty hill.&quot; 
 
38 
 
 who could paint a picture of &quot; Monadnock &quot; which would do 
 justice to Emerson s conception. He has delineated it through 
 his &quot; shaping spirit of the imagination,&quot; as really as Shakespeare 
 did his human creations. Yet, the poem overflows with sug 
 gestion and inspiration for any one who would attempt to re 
 produce a mountain truthfully a soul made visible through sub 
 stance as are all forms which reveal to us the beautiful or the 
 sublime. 
 
 The mighty personality of &quot; Monadnock&quot; is what Emerson 
 makes us feel ; and the fine, withering irony with which the spirit 
 of the summit unfolds his visions upon the &quot; bead-eyes &quot; that 
 come boldly up to face him is something unique in poetry : 
 
 I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding ; 
 
 &quot; See there the grim gray rounding 
 
 Of the bullet of the earth 
 
 Whereon ye sail, 
 
 Tumbling steep 
 
 In the uncontinented deep.&quot; 
 
 He looks on that, and he turns pale. 
 
 I scowl on him with my cloud, 
 With my north-wind chill his blood ; 
 I lame him, clattering down the rocks; 
 And to live he is in fear. 
 Then, at last, I let him down 
 Once more into his dapper town, 
 To chatter, frightened, to his clan, 
 And forget me, if he can. 
 
 Mountains suggest pine-trees, the aboriginal, and, let us hope, 
 the never-to-be-exterminated dwellers upon their slopes. True, 
 
39 
 
 the hand of the utilitarian spoiler is upon their beauty and their 
 glory all through the North, but, if ever our pine-forests are de 
 stroyed, the North will have lost the deepest intonation of its 
 outdoor poetry. For the leaves of the pine are harp-strings 
 played upon by the viewless presences of the air, and the bard 
 can but receive their music, and let it reverberate through his 
 song. In their somber contrast with the sheeny whiteness of 
 hillsides and fields in winter, in the depth and thoughtfulness 
 they add to a landscape, they are a source of unconscious inspi 
 ration to all who dwell among their shadows ; and, naturally, the 
 pine-tree has stirred into being some of the noblest lyrics of our 
 
 land. It is 
 
 A harp for every wind, 
 
 A voice for every sky. 
 
 One of Bayard Taylor s best poems is his &quot; Metempsychosis 
 of the Pine &quot; : 
 
 Rooted upon a cape that overhung 
 
 The entrance to a mountain-gorge, whereon 
 The wintry shadow of a peak was flung 
 
 Long after rise of sun, 
 There did I clutch the granite with firm feet, 
 
 There shake my boughs above the roaring gulf, 
 When mountain whirlwinds through the passes beat, 
 
 And howled the mountain wolf. 
 
 We have all lingered with Longfellow, where 
 
 The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, 
 
 Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, 
 
 Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic 
 
 Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. 
 
The rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown 
 Composed the netzvork of his throne.&quot; 
 
And we know Lowell s &quot; Pine-Tree/ limned in grand relief 
 against the wilderness horizon of Maine : 
 
 Far up on Katahdin thou towerest, 
 Purple-blue with the distance and vast. 
 
 Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob, as he goes 
 Groping down to the sea neath his mountainous snows ; 
 Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires that throw 
 Their own threatening shadows far round o er the snow, 
 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, half-lighted, supply 
 A canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try, 
 Blotting in giant horrors 
 
 in the noon-twilight of primeval forests like these, Lowell has 
 learned, and shown us also, that the growth of the legend is 
 like the growth of the pine : 
 
 Its bony roots clutching around and across, 
 
 As if they would tear up earth s heart in their grasp, 
 
 Ere the storm should uproot them, or make them unclasp. 
 
 But Emerson s verse is so alive with the harmonies that surge 
 through the pines, it is almost as if the voice of the poet and 
 of the tree were one : 
 
 Waved the pine-tree through my thought, 
 And fanned the dreams it never brought. 
 
 So he sings ; and what has he not seen, as well as heard, 
 
4 2 
 
 wandering in the deep woodlands, over lichens and mosses that 
 only half conceal 
 
 The rope-like pine- roots crosswise grown ? 
 
 Come, lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes, 
 
 Of things with things, of times with times, 
 
 Primal chimes of sun and shade, 
 
 Of sound and echo, man and maid, 
 
 The land reflected in the flood, 
 
 Body with shadow still pursued. 
 
 Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 
 
 Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
 But it carves the bow of beauty there, 
 
 And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. 
 
 He has elsewhere said that the &quot; difference between landscape 
 and landscape is small, but there is great difference in beholders. 
 There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape as the 
 necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies.&quot; 
 
 Not every eye can see what a poet like Emerson beholds in 
 the manifold phases of Nature, each and all the expression of 
 one eternal thought ; not every one perceives, with him, how it 
 
 is that 
 
 All the forms are fugitive, 
 
 But the substances survive. 
 Ever fresh the broad creation, 
 A divine improvisation ; 
 
 and probably those whose lives are most barren, through the 
 beauty-blindness he so well describes, are least aware of their 
 inward lack : 
 
43 
 
 When thou shalt climb the mountain-cliff, 
 Or see the wide shore from thy skiff, 
 To thee the horizon shall express 
 Only emptiness and emptiness. 
 
 Alas ! thine is the bankruptcy, 
 Blessed Nature so to see ! 
 
 By sunken reefs the hoarse sea roars ; 
 
 Above the shelving sands, 
 Like skeletons, the sycamores 
 
 Uplift their wasted hands&quot; 
 
 But many a one has felt, without knowing its meaning, that 
 poet-stir in the heart which urges the hand of the artist to its 
 work, whenever it is done purely and truly, while following the 
 footsteps of the seer along 
 
 The unplanted forest-floor, whereon 
 
 The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone, 
 
 and beholding beauty spring up and glimmer around him, at once 
 
44 
 
 his despair and his hope. And few can fail to appreciate graceful 
 touches like that which makes us see 
 
 Beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, 
 
 The slight Linnea hang its twin-born heads ; 
 
 or that which, unveiling the woodland retreat of the Rhodora, 
 assures us that 
 
 If eyes were made for seeing, 
 
 Then beauty is its own excuse for being. 
 
 When we read Emerson s poetry, we can scarcely think of 
 surfaces and outlines ; we are in the very heart of Nature, and 
 it does not occur to us to examine his verses as landscape- 
 drawing. But the artist-power is there, nevertheless, the insight 
 which is more than faculty, through which we are shown 
 pictures so full of imaginative reality as to he ineffaceable. The 
 truth is, he is so great a poet that we sometimes forget he is a 
 poet at all ; even as we live on in unconsciousness of the won 
 der-working illumination of universal sunlight around us. Rightly 
 reading him, we feel that art and poetry are only true when at 
 one with the central forces of Beauty and Power that uphold 
 the universe. 
 
 But perhaps we are lingering too long among the pines. 
 Other trees wave through the pages of our poets with every 
 variety of ^Eolian rhythm, and other boughs outline themselves 
 thereon before the reader s vision. No one among them has 
 given us more delightful glimpses of his favorite leaf-embowered 
 seclusion, or more definite characterization of the trees whose 
 overshadowing he loves, than Lowell. A choice few among his 
 
45 
 
 many beautiful poems of this kind are &quot; Al Fresco,&quot; &quot; The Beg 
 gar,&quot; &quot; Under the Willows,&quot; and that perfect little idyl, &quot; The 
 Birch-Tree,&quot; beginning so breezily : 
 
 i 
 
 Rippling through thy branches goes the sunshine, 
 
 Among thy leaves that palpitate forever. 
 
 There is not space here even to suggest the numerous and 
 beautiful pen-and-ink tree-sketches we remember. But we can 
 show how, in one instance, artist and poet have both caught the 
 weird outreach of scarred sycamore-boughs against a lonely sea 
 and a darkening sky. It is Aldrich s &quot; Twilight,&quot; where, in four 
 short stanzas, we have a clear, strong landscape a darkening 
 autumnal day, illumined with one gleam from a solitary cottage : 
 
 By sunken reefs the hoarse sea roars ; 
 
 Above the shelving sands, 
 Like skeletons, the sycamores 
 
 Uplift their wasted hands. 
 
 In yonder cottage shines a light 
 
 Far-gleaming like a gem. 
 Not fairer to the Rabbins sight 
 
 Was star of Bethlehem. 
 
 In Stoddard s &quot; November &quot; there is a picture similar in its 
 suggestions, though without the single ray of cheer : 
 
 A barren realm of withered fields ; 
 
 Bleak woods of fallen leaves ; 
 The palest morns that ever dawned ; 
 
 The dreariest of eves. 
 
4 6 
 
 While it is true that poetry is a light which reveals deep 
 shadows, it is also true that the eye not seldom creates the pic 
 ture it sees ; and many a one, gazing where 
 
 Gaunt shadows stretch along the hill, 
 
 may regard the dark tracery of interlacing boughs but as a net 
 work through which the glow of sunset is revealed, and strength 
 is added to the firm outlines of the seaward-slanting hillside. 
 Still &quot;the pathos of the falling leaf&quot; is as positive a reality as 
 
 &quot; Gaunt shadows stretch along the hill. &quot; 
 
 the transparency of June sunshine, lighting up thousand-fold 
 blossoming meadows and woods. 
 
 We have among our poets those who can elaborate pictures 
 as delicate as the spinning of dew and gossamer across the light 
 grass on a breezeless summer morning, as well as those who, by 
 a stroke of their mighty magic, can make the world broaden 
 and the heavens deepen upon our vision. 
 
 Let us be thankful for each for every cunning and every 
 powerful hand that can uplift the veil from the earth whereon we 
 dwell, and make visible the beauty in which it was created, and 
 is immortally clothed ! 
 
IV. 
 
 &quot; It touched the wood-bird s folded wing, 
 And said, O Bird, awake and sing ! &quot; 
 
 SOUTHWARD from the granite bluffs, the deep, rocky 
 *^ gorges and sandy coves of Cape Ann, in Massachusetts 
 a region concerning which many a legend has been woven into 
 the songs of our poets beyond the rugged cliffs of Marblehead, 
 and the broken shores of Swampscott, the peninsula of Nahant 
 
4 8 
 
 reaches by its beach-causeway into the sea a long, yellow finger 
 poising a rough emerald on its tip two emeralds, rather for 
 there is a Great Nahant and a Little Nahant. The grandeur 
 of the sea-views, and the wild beauty of the shores, as well as 
 the near neighborhood of the city of Boston, have always at 
 tracted visitors to the place, which has now grown into a sub 
 urban village, a summer resort more and more thronged every 
 year. 
 
 Prominent among the distinguished people who for many 
 years made this their retreat during the heated months, are the 
 names of Agassiz and Longfellow. The latter is at present of 
 especial interest to us, because of songs of his which reveal un 
 mistakably the inspiration of winds and waves that beat against 
 the storm-worn buttresses of Nahant. But the memory of his 
 great-hearted friend and neighbor, the world-renowned naturalist, 
 resounds through the hoarse moan of the surges, in the poet s 
 lines : 
 
 I stand again on the familiar shore, 
 
 And hear the waves of the distracted sea 
 Piteously calling and lamenting thee, 
 
 And waiting restless at thy cottage-door. 
 
 The rocks, the sea-weed on the ocean-floor, 
 The willows in the meadow, and the free 
 Wild winds of the Atlantic welcome me : 
 
 Then why shouldst thou be dead, and come no more? 
 
 The sorrow of earth blends all too readily with the eternal 
 sadness of the sea, and, when the pain of bereavement has pierced 
 to the inmost being, visions appear, memories arise, and the wide 
 green earth and the gray blank of ocean are each but as a can- 
 
49 
 
 vas for pictures thrilled into life by that awakening beautiful, 
 tender, and solemn as the infinite mysteries wherewith life is 
 surrounded. Some magician s wand seems moving among the 
 mists and clouds of the far horizon, evoking phantasmal colors 
 and outlines from the gleaming expanse, as we read &quot; Palin 
 genesis &quot; : 
 
 I lay upon the headland height, and listened 
 
 To the incessant sobbing of the sea 
 
 In caverns under me, 
 And watched the waves, that tossed, and fled, and glistened 
 
 Until the rolling meadows of amethyst 
 
 Melted away in mist. 
 
 Then suddenly, as one from sleep, I started ; 
 
 For round about me all the sunny capes 
 
 Seemed peopled with the shapes 
 Of those whom I had known in days departed, 
 
 Appareled in the loveliness which gleams 
 
 On faces seen in dreams. 
 
 A moment only, and the light and glory 
 
 Faded away, and the disconsolate shore 
 
 Stood lonely as before ; 
 And the wild roses of the promontory 
 
 Around me shuddered in the wind, and shed 
 
 Their petals of pale red. 
 
 &quot; Oh, give me back,&quot; I cried, &quot; the vanished splendors, 
 The breath of morn, and the exultant strife 
 When the swift stream of life 
 
 Bounds o er its rocky channels, and surrenders 
 
50 
 
 The pond, with all its lilies, for the leap 
 Into the unknown deep ! &quot; 
 
 And the sea answered with a lamentation, 
 Like some old prophet wailing, and it said, 
 &quot; Alas ! thy youth is dead ! &quot; 
 
 Longfellow gives us other touches of the sea-feeling which 
 has stirred his thoughts to expression in this locality, less over 
 powering in their pathos, yet all profoundly sympathetic with the 
 unrest which is one of the chief fascinations of ocean-scenery. 
 From the headlands of Nahant he has listened to the bells of 
 Lynn ; and he sings : 
 
 O curfew of the setting sun ! O Bells of Lynn ! 
 O requiem of the dying day ! 
 
 O Bells of Lynn ! 
 
 From the dark belfries of yon cloud-cathedral wafted 
 Your sounds aerial seem to float, 
 
 O Bells of Lynn ! 
 
 The fisherman in his boat far out beyond the headland, 
 Listens, and leisurely rows ashore, 
 
 O Bells of Lynn ! 
 
 Over the shining sands the wandering cattle homeward 
 Follow each other at your call, 
 
 O Bells of Lynn ! 
 
 And down the darkening coast run the tumultuous surges, 
 And clap their hands and shout to you, 
 
 O Bells of Lynn ! 
 
&quot; / lay upon the headland height, and listened 
 To the incessant sobbing of the sea.&quot; 
 
 Farther up the shore yet not many miles farther is the 
 view the poet looked out upon from beside &quot; The Fire of Drift 
 wood &quot; of the roofs and steeples of Marblehead, and the sur 
 rounding sea : 
 
52 
 
 We sat within the farmhouse old, 
 
 Whose windows, looking o er the bay, 
 
 Gave to the sea-breeze, damp and cold, 
 An easy entrance, night and day. 
 
 Not far away we saw the port, 
 
 The strange, old-fashioned, silent town ; 
 
 The lighthouse, the dismantled fort, 
 The wooden houses, quaint and brown. 
 
 We sat and talked until the night, 
 
 Descending, filled the little room ; 
 Our faces faded from the sight ; 
 
 Our voices only broke the gloom. 
 
 The very tones in which we spake 
 
 Had something strange, I could but mark ; 
 
 The leaves of memory seemed to make 
 A mournful rustling in the dark. 
 
 Oft died the words upon our lips, 
 
 As suddenly, from out the fire, 
 Built of the wreck of stranded ships, 
 
 The flames would leap and then expire. 
 
 And as their splendor flashed and failed, 
 We thought of wrecks upon the main ; 
 
 Of ships dismasted, that were hailed, 
 And sent no answer back again. 
 
 As there is something indescribably delicious in the blending 
 of sea-scents with inland odors from forest, meadow, and garden, 
 so there are poems and pictures throughout which the atmos- 
 
53 
 
 phere of wave and shore is marvelously interfused, giving us a 
 sense of deep sweetness in wide breathing-room the delight, 
 almost, of entering into a new existence. Longfellow s &quot; Day 
 break &quot; is one of these : 
 
 A wind came up out of the sea, 
 
 And said, &quot; O Mists, make room for me ! &quot; 
 
 It hailed the ships, and cried, &quot; Sail on, 
 Ye mariners, the night is gone ! &quot; 
 
 It said unto the forest, &quot; Shout ! 
 Hang all your leafy banners out ! &quot; 
 
 . It touched the wood-bird s folded wing, 
 And said, &quot; O Bird, awake and sing ! &quot; 
 
 It crossed the churchyard with a sigh, 
 And said, &quot; Not yet ! In quiet lie ! &quot; 
 
 The poem ends with the inevitable sadness, but what glory 
 of unimaginable dawn is hidden in that &quot; Not yet ! &quot; 
 
 We turn from the gloom of the night-infolded sea to songs 
 of the fair, blooming land, and to never-wearying portrayals of 
 spring, glad to refresh ourselves with suggestions of green fields 
 and running streams, even though reminded that 
 
 It is not always May.&quot; 
 
 Here, again, it is Longfellow who charms us with a glimpse 
 of the awakening year : 
 
 The sun is bright, the air is clear, 
 The darting swallows soar and sing, 
 
54 
 
 And from the stately elms I hear 
 The bluebirds prophesying spring. 
 
 The sun is bright, the air is clear, 
 The darting swallows soar and sing. 1 
 
 So blue yon winding river flows, 
 It seems an outlet from the sky 
 
 Where, waiting till the west wind blows, 
 The freighted clouds at anchor lie. 
 
 All things are new the buds, the leaves, 
 That gild the elm-tree s nodding crest ; 
 
 And e en the nest beneath the eaves 
 There are no birds in last year s nest ! 
 
55 
 
 Spring landscapes open on the pages of all our poets, although, 
 writing from New England latitudes, many of them can but re 
 peat the unwilling, half-withdrawn promise with which that sea 
 son approaches us. Certain it is that 
 
 The spring comes slowly up this way, 
 and Lowell is justified in his assertion that 
 
 May is a pious fraud of the almanac. 
 
 Perhaps most of our poets look for her too early, accepting 
 the traditional May-day of milder climates ; for one can not con 
 fidently say that spring is here until just as May is passing into 
 June. But all the more stimulating to the imagination are the 
 lovely days that suddenly gleam in upon us after long delays and 
 tantalizing disappearances such mornings as Longfellow has sung 
 
 of: 
 
 O gift of God ! O perfect day, 
 
 Whereon shall no man work, but play ! 
 
 Whereon it is enough for me 
 
 Not to be doing, but to be ! 
 
 Blow, winds ! and waft through all the rooms 
 
 The snow-flakes of the cherry-blooms ! 
 
 Blow, winds ! and bend within my reach 
 
 The fiery blossoms of the peach ! 
 
 A spring-picture without birds would be very incomplete. 
 But see them and hear them in the opening verses of the 
 &quot; Birds of Killingworth &quot; : 
 
 It was the season when, through all the land, 
 The merle and mavis build ; and, building, sing 
 
 8 
 
56 
 
 Those lovely lyrics written by His hand, 
 
 Whom Saxon Caedmon calls the Blithe-heart King ; 
 
 When on the boughs the purple buds expand, 
 The banners of the vanguard of the spring ; 
 
 And rivulets, rejoicing, rush and leap, 
 
 And wave their fluttering signals from the steep. 
 
 The robin and the bluebird, piping loud, 
 
 Filled all the blossoming orchards with their glee ; 
 
 The sparrows chirped as if they still were proud 
 Their race in Holy Writ should mentioned be ; 
 
 And hungry crows, assembled in a crowd, 
 Clamored their piteous prayer incessantly, 
 
 Knowing who hears the ravens cry, and said, 
 
 &quot; Give us, O Lord, this day our daily bread ! &quot; 
 
 The thrush that carols at the dawn of day, 
 From the green steeples of the piny wood ; 
 
 The oriole in the elm, the noisy jay, 
 Jargoning like a foreigner at his food : 
 
 The ballad-singers and the Troubadours, 
 
 The street-musicians of the heavenly city 
 The birds, who make sweet music for us all 
 
 In our dark hours, as David did for Saul : 
 
 Whose habitations in the tree-tops even, 
 Are half-way houses on the road to heaven. 
 
 Longfellow s tender and graceful fancies are as enchanting as 
 the notes of singing-birds from many lands ; and the scenery of 
 his verse is equally varied. There is scarcely a country which is 
 
57 
 
 not made more beautiful to us by some song of his. One travels 
 as on a sunbeam, in his poetry, from the stormy Scandinavian 
 
 &quot; Gossiping out of the bank flew myriad twittering swallows ; 
 And on the boughs of the sycamores quarreled and chattered the blackbirds&quot; 
 
 fiords to the gleaming Rhine, and the bright waters of the 
 Mediterranean, or across our own wide continent the home of 
 Hiawatha and the scene of Evangeline s wanderings ; and every 
 
58 
 
 American is proud of the world-wide recognition his exquisite 
 minstrelsy has deservedly received. 
 
 Not many of our poets have written of the West from the 
 outlook of a residence there ; but one of them Howells is the 
 author of some very charming poems illustrative of that region. 
 If these have sometimes been overlooked, it is, perhaps, because 
 of his fame as a still more charming novelist than poet. His 
 &quot; Movers &quot; has something of the pensive sweetness of &quot; Hermann 
 and Dorothea.&quot; It is the story of a family leaving their old 
 home, and emigrating yet farther westward : 
 
 Parting was over at last, and all the good-byes had been spoken ; 
 Up the long hillside-road the white-tented wagon moved slowly, 
 Bearing the mother and children, while onward before them the father 
 Trudged with his gun on his arm, and the faithful house-dog beside 
 
 him, 
 Grave and sedate, as if knowing the sorrowful thoughts of his master. 
 
 Sweet was the smell of the dewy leaves and the flowers in the wild- 
 wood ; 
 
 Fair the long reaches of sun and shade in the aisles of the forest ; 
 
 Glad of the spring, and of love, and of morning, the wild-birds were 
 singing ; 
 
 Jays to each other called harshly, then mellowly fluted together ; 
 
 Sang the oriole songs as golden and gay as his plumage ; 
 
 Pensively piped the querulous quails their greetings unfrequent ; 
 
 Gossiping out of the bank flew myriad twittering swallows ; 
 And on the boughs of the sycamores quarreled and chattered the black 
 birds. 
 
59 
 
 The brightness and freshness of that Western April dawn, 
 and the picturesque group gazing upon their old home from the 
 hilltop, make a pastoral sketch full of lovely local color : 
 
 Long together they gazed on the beautiful valley before them, 
 
 Looked on the well-known fields that stretched away to the woodlands, 
 
 Where, in the dark lines of green, showed the milk-white crest of the 
 
 dogwood, 
 
 Snow of wild-plums in bloom, and the crimson tints of the red-bud 
 Looked on the pasture-fields, where the cattle were leisurely grazing ; 
 Soft, and sweet, and thin, came the faint, far notes of the cow-bells 
 Looked on the oft-trodden lanes, with their elder and blackberry borders, 
 Looked on the orchard, a bloomy sea, with its billows of blossoms. 
 Fair was the scene, yet suddenly strange, and all unfamiliar, 
 As are the faces of friends when the word of farewell has been spoken. 
 Long together they gazed ; then at last on the little log-cabin, 
 Home for so many years, now home no longer for ever, 
 Rested their tearless eyes in the silent rapture of anguish. 
 
 As English verse blossoms with hawthorn-hedgerows, and 
 makes us familiar with spring-time in the mother-country, al 
 though we may never have seen it, so our poets delight in the 
 roadside glory of apple-orchards in bloom, concerning which they 
 can never be too eloquent. Bryant s &quot; Planting of the Apple- 
 Tree &quot; hints it all, and these stanzas from Howells s &quot; Spring-time&quot; 
 give us a glimpse of the rose-tinted May splendor, with which 
 most readers are familiar : 
 
 Behold the wonder, O silence ! 
 
 Strange as if wrought in a night, 
 The waited and lingering glory, 
 
 The world-old, fresh delight ! 
 
6o 
 
 O blossoms that hang like winter, 
 
 Drifted upon the trees, 
 O birds that sing in the blossoms, 
 
 O blossom-haunting bees 
 
 O green, green leaves in the branches, 
 
 O shadowy dark below, 
 O cool of the aisles of orchards, 
 
 Woods that the wild-flowers know 
 
 O blossoms that hang like winter, 
 Drifted upon the trees. &quot; 
 
 O air of gold and perfume 
 
 Wind, breathing sweet, and sun 
 O sky of perfect azure 
 
 Day, heaven, and earth, in one ! 
 
6i 
 
 It is no wonder that the poets, from Chaucer to our own 
 time childlike old Chaucer, with his hands full of daisies, and 
 his heart dancing to the motion of the tremulous, &quot; glad, light- 
 green &quot; leaves of the bursting forest-boughs should sing, as the 
 birds do their sweetest songs, when filled with the ecstasy of 
 spring. On their pages one usually finds more satisfactory pic 
 tures of the season than on canvas ; for what pigment can repro 
 duce the inundating sunshine, almost without shadow, or the 
 floods of woodland melody from brook, and bird, and breeze, 
 which are the life of the lovely time ? And, for contrasts of 
 blooming freshness with the pallor and darkness of winter the 
 glow against the chill we look to no region of perpetual spring, 
 but to the north, where song is an ever-repeated resurrection in 
 the singer s heart, that knows no more of age than the new-born 
 year. So carols one of our poets for the whole brotherhood : 
 
 Spring still makes spring in the mind, 
 
 When sixty years are told ; 
 Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, 
 
 And we are never old. 
 Over the winter glaciers 
 
 I see the summer glow, 
 And, through the wild-piled snow-drifts, 
 
 The warm rose-buds below. 
 
V. 
 
 41 Darker and darker 
 
 The black shadows fall.&quot; 
 
 ^\\ 7&quot;E seek summer landscapes in poetry, as elsewhere, for 
 * * coolness, for soothing, for seclusion, and peace. And 
 we feel these elements, with some of our singers, in the very 
 flow of their verse. The rhythms of Nature glide through their 
 measures when they sing of her, and their flowers and trees 
 spring into being to the tones of some subtile, all-harmonizing 
 music, even as do hers. For the blossoms whose home is in 
 quiet, green nooks, beside lakelet or cascade, or 
 
63 
 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round- 
 growing up, as did Wordsworth s maiden, &quot; in sun and shower/ 
 to embody the enchantments of their birthplace, are in their 
 Naiad-like freshness mutely eloquent with the 
 
 Beauty born of murmuring sound, 
 
 which passes into their looks, as the poet makes it 
 
 Pass into her face. 
 
 Such a blossom is the &quot; Flower-de-Luce &quot; of Longfellow 
 
 Dwelling by still rivers 
 Or solitary mere, 
 
 Or where the sluggish meadow-brook delivers 
 Its waters to the weir. 
 
 No matter if man has come near with his noisy inventions, 
 
 the azure flag-lily sits undisturbed beside her mirroring pool : 
 
 t 
 Thou laughest at the mill, the whirr and worry 
 
 Of spindle and of loom, 
 
 And the great wheel that toils amid the Hurry 
 And rushing of the flume. 
 
 Born in the purple, born to joy and pleasance, 
 
 Thou dost not toil nor spin, 
 But makest glad and radiant with thy presence 
 
 The meadow and the lin. 
 
 The burnished dragon-fly is thine attendant, 
 And tilts against the field, 
 
6 4 
 
 And down the listed sunbeam rides resplendent, 
 With steel-blue mail and shield. 
 
 Thou art the Iris fair among the fairest, 
 
 Who, armed with golden rod, 
 And winged with the celestial azure, bearest 
 
 The message of some god. 
 
 Whether or not this Iris may be the same flower that illumines 
 the text of Phebe Gary s &quot; Field-Preaching,&quot; hers, too, has a 
 presence and a message worth attention : 
 
 And the right royal lily, putting on 
 Her robes, more rich than those of Solomon, 
 Opened her gorgeous missal in the sun, 
 And thanked Him soft and low, 
 Whose gracious, liberal hand had clothed her so. 
 
 Sometimes we meet with a poem from an unfamiliar author, 
 which, by its beauty, reminds us that now, as always, some of 
 the most poetic natures may be living unheard of and unseen 
 in their chosen retirement, like the flowers and streams they sing 
 of. Such a poem is &quot; Birch-Stream,&quot; bearing the signature of 
 Anna Boynton Averill : 
 
 At noon, within the dusty town, 
 Where the wild river rushes down, 
 
 And thunders hoarsely all day long, 
 I think of thee, my hermit stream, 
 Low singing in thy summer dream 
 
 Thine idle, sweet, old, tranquil song. 
 
65 
 
 And the great wheel that toils amid the hurry 
 And rushing of the flume&quot; 
 
 Northward, Katahdin s chasmed pile 
 Looms through thy low, long, leafy aisle ; 
 
66 
 
 Eastward, Olamon s summit shines ; 
 And I, upon thy grassy shore, 
 The dreamful, happy child of yore, 
 
 Worship before mine olden shrines. 
 
 Again the sultry noontide hush 
 Is sweetly broken by the thrush, 
 
 Whose clear bell rings and dies away 
 Beside thy banks, in coverts deep, 
 Where nodding buds of orchis sleep 
 
 In dusk, and dream not it is day. 
 
 Again the wild cow-lily floats 
 Her golden freighted, tented boats 
 
 In thy cool coves of softened gloom, 
 O ershadowed by the whispering reed, 
 And purple plumes of pickerel-weed, 
 
 And meadow-sweet in tangled bloom. 
 
 The startled minnows dart in flocks 
 Beneath thy glimmering amber rocks, 
 
 If but a zephyr stir the brake ; 
 The silent swallow swoops, a flash 
 Of light and leaves, with dainty plash, 
 
 A ring of ripples in her wake. 
 
 Poets and painters love the meadow-sweet, as they should, 
 for its name does not belie its unpretending summer loveliness. 
 A glimpse and a waft of it come to us from the pen of George 
 Arnold : 
 
 The creamy banks of meadow-sweet 
 Along the mill-stream s margin grow, 
 
6 7 
 
 Where honey-bees with pollened feet 
 Hum softly to and fro. 
 
 The sound is sweet, the fragrance rare, 
 
 As summer breezes float along ; 
 And round me, all the summer air 
 
 Is full of scent and song. 
 
 There are trees which have in them the ripple of running 
 brooks, and one of them is the birch, which Lowell has made 
 so like a living being in its shy, tremulous gracefulness : 
 
 Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet, 
 Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad, 
 Dripping about thy slim white stem, whose shadow 
 Slopes quivering down the water s dusky quiet, 
 Thou shrink st, as on her bath s edge would some startled Dryad. 
 
 Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble, 
 Thou sympathizest still ; wild and unquiet, 
 I fling me down ; thy ripple, like a river 
 Flows valleyward, where calmness is, and by it 
 My heart is floated down into the land of quiet. 
 
 And we can not turn away from rivulets, and lakes, and mill- 
 streams, without reminding ourselves of the same poet s &quot; Beaver 
 Brook,&quot; for scarcely another streamlet flows through our native 
 verse with so sweet a charm : 
 
 Warm noon brims full the valley s cup, 
 
 The aspen s leaves are scarce astir ; 
 Only the little mill sends up 
 
 Its busy, never-ceasing burr. 
 
68 
 
 u Of waters blue 
 That from the distance sparkle 
 
 through 
 Some woodland gap.&quot; 
 
 &quot; Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet, 
 Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad.&quot; 
 
6 9 
 
 Beneath a long buttonwood 
 
 The mill s red door lets forth the din ; 
 
 The whitened miller, dust-imbued, 
 Flits past the square of dark within. 
 
 No mountain torrent s strength is here ; 
 
 Sweet Beaver, child of forest still, 
 Heaps its small pitcher to the ear, 
 
 And gently waits the miller s will. 
 
 The miller dreams not at what cost 
 
 The quivering mill-stones hum and whirl, 
 
 Nor how for every turn are tost 
 Armfuls of diamond and of pearl. 
 
 Not unlike the meanderings of a brook are the windings of 
 many a country road, bordered with blossoming thickets, and 
 leaning trees, and opening upon unexpected vistas of lovely 
 scenery. More suggestive, indeed, are the changes of the foot 
 path or the highway, as revealing more traces of the human life 
 which has made there its pilgrimage or encampment. And, in 
 itself, what is more picturesque than an ancient, deserted thor 
 oughfare, where brambles and moss-grown rocks, old willows and 
 lichen-draped fences, and wild-roses entangled with nodding ferns, 
 have it all their own way by right of undisturbed possession ? 
 For something very delightful of this kind, one seldom need go 
 far to seek, anywhere in the country. 
 
 Only a bit of the highway, sunning itself on the hill ; 
 By it the beautiful river, singing a song in the mill. 
 
/o 
 
 Only a bit of the highway I see as I sit by the door ; 
 
 And the valley is pleasant behind it, and the valley is pleasant before 
 
 sings Hiram Rich, whose songs, if neither many nor widely 
 known, are very sweet. And Bryant leads us through one of his 
 lovely wood-paths by a most delicate thread of music : 
 
 From the dusty path there opens, 
 
 Eastward, an unknown way ; 
 Above its windings pleasantly 
 
 The woodland branches . play. 
 
 A silvery brook comes stealing 
 
 From the shadow of the trees, 
 Where slender herbs of the forest stoop 
 
 Before the entering breeze, 
 
 Along those pleasant windings 
 
 I would my journey lay, 
 Where the shade is cool, and the dew of night 
 
 Is not yet dried away. 
 
 And where does such another &quot; Gleam of Sunshine &quot; fall, as 
 on the wayside picture so familiar to us through the beautiful 
 lines of Longfellow ? 
 
 Here runs the highway to the town ; 
 
 There the green lane descends, 
 Through which I walked to church with thee, 
 
 O gentlest of my friends ! 
 
 The shadow of the linden-trees 
 Lay moving on the grass ; 
 
&quot; Through the green lanes of the country, 
 
 Pause by some neglected graveyard, 
 For a while to muse, and ponder} 1 
 
 10 
 
72 
 
 Between them and the moving boughs, 
 A shadow, thou didst pass. 
 
 I saw the branches of the trees 
 
 Bend down thy touch to meet, 
 The clover-blossoms in the grass 
 
 Rise up to kiss thy feet. 
 
 But it is not always sunlit openings, and living forms like 
 this fair human vision, that one sees by the rural roadside. The 
 same sweet singer gives us, elsewhere, a hint of the gloomier 
 shadow which falls across our accustomed paths : 
 
 Ye who sometimes, in your rambles 
 Through the green lanes of the country, 
 Where the tangled barberry-bushes 
 Hang their tufts of crimson berries 
 Over stone walls gray with mosses, 
 Pause by some neglected graveyard, 
 For a while to muse, and ponder 
 On a half-effaced inscription 
 Written with little skill of song-craft, 
 Homely phrases, but each letter 
 Full of hope and full of heart-break 
 
 and, one and all, we recognize ourselves as included among the 
 saunterers or wayfarers addressed. 
 
 A country burial-place ! How unlike the flower-strewn green 
 ness, the cloistered seclusion of an old English churchyard, is the 
 scene that is suggested by those words ! Arid and shadeless, its 
 rudely-inclosed desolation makes us shudder as over our own 
 coming fate, hinting so forcibly the neglect which follows forget- 
 
73 
 
 fulness when we pass from human sight. And sometimes the 
 ungracious hand of well-meaning Care exaggerates its bareness 
 by interfering with the wild ministries of Nature, who seldom 
 performs her wayside work for the living or the dead in any 
 unlovely way. When left to herself, she does her best to render 
 these deserted retreats picturesque. 
 
 The poet Whittier has truthfully sketched &quot; The Old Burying- 
 Ground &quot; : 
 
 Our vales are sweet with fern and rose ; 
 
 Our hills are maple-crowned ; 
 But not from them our fathers chose 
 The village burying-ground. 
 
 The dreariest spot in all the land 
 
 To death they set apart; 
 With scanty grace from Nature s hand, 
 
 And none from that of Art. 
 
 A winding wall of mossy stone, 
 
 Frost-flung and broken, lines 
 A lonesome acre thinly grown 
 
 With grass and wandering vines. 
 
 Without the wall the birch-tree shows 
 
 Its drooped and tasseled head ; 
 Within, a stag-horned sumach grows, 
 
 Fern-leafed, with spikes of red. 
 
 Low moans the river from its bed ; 
 
 The distant pines reply ; 
 Like mourners shrinking from the dead, 
 
 They stand apart and sigh. 
 
74 
 * 
 
 Yet still the wilding flowers would grow, 
 
 The golden leaves would fall, 
 The seasons come, the seasons go, 
 
 And God be good to all. 
 
 Above the graves the blackberry hung 
 
 In bloom and green its wreath ; 
 And harebells swung as if they rung 
 
 The chimes of peace beneath. 
 
 The beauty Nature loves to share, 
 
 The gifts she hath for all, 
 The common light, the common air, 
 
 O er-crept the graveyard s wall ! 
 
 Upon all graves the sunset shadows fall gently and solemnly, 
 through the tolling of twilight winds the only &quot; curfew &quot; known 
 to our shores, except that rung by some minstrel s hand, unless 
 we can hear a mediaeval echo in the ringing of the village nine 
 
 o clock bell : 
 
 Cover the embers, 
 
 And put out the light ; 
 Toil comes with the morning, 
 And rest with the night. 
 
 Song sinks into silence ; 
 
 The story is told ; 
 The windows are darkened, 
 
 The hearthstone is cold. 
 
 Darker and darker 
 
 The black shadows fall ; 
 Sleep and oblivion 
 
 Reign over all. 
 
75 
 
 The darkness of the last shadowing sleep which everywhere 
 makes sharp contrast with the brightness of sunshine and the 
 
 &quot; The rising moon has hid the stars ; 
 
 Her level rays, like golden bars, 
 
 Lie on the landscape green&quot; 
 
 gladness of living creatures, can not be left out of a landscape 
 traversed by human feet, but it almost always harmonizes itself 
 with the sheltering peace of Nature. In &quot; Thanatopsis,&quot; the glory 
 
of the visible universe enrobes man,, sinking to his final slumber 
 on the bosom of earth ; and every poet, whose inner vision is 
 unclouded, brings some ray to soften the gloom : 
 
 Alas for him who never sees 
 The stars shine through the cypress-trees ! 
 Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, 
 Nor looks to see the breaking day 
 Across the mournful marbles play ! 
 
 Returning from reveries too somber, there is cheer in the 
 mild illumination of moonlight, which infolds earth as in a 
 dream. The half-unreal shapes and tints around us, the mysti 
 cal atmosphere which invests everything, are as dim, far-off hints 
 of the coming dawn, which, were it not daily repeated, would be 
 a miracle too radiant for belief. 
 
 Under the rays of the moon, our common trodden footpaths 
 look phantasmal. The wonder-world of myth and faerie seems 
 not an impossible creation, amid the illusions of moonlight, 
 wherein the landmarks of our every-day outlook are lost. Who 
 shall say, lingering in the spell of that glamour, that the legend 
 of Endymion was a fable only ? 
 
 The rising moon has hid the stars ; 
 Her level rays, like golden bars, 
 
 Lie on the landscape green, 
 
 With shadows brown between. 
 
 And silver white the river gleams, 
 As if Diana, in her dreams, 
 
 Had dropped her silver bow 
 
 Upon the meadows low. 
 
77 
 
 What moonlight is by a lake-side, by the beautiful lake which 
 the former dusky tenantry of our hills and woods poetically 
 named &quot; The Smile of the Great Spirit,&quot; has been outlined for 
 us in Whittier s verses : 
 
 Yon mountain s side is black with night, 
 
 While, broad-orbed, o er its gleaming crown, 
 
 The moon, slow rounding into sight, 
 On the hushed inland sea looks down. 
 
 How start to light the clustering isles, 
 
 Each silver-hemmed ! How sharply show 
 
 The shadows of their rocky piles 
 And tree-tops in the wave below ! 
 
 How far and strange the mountains seem, 
 Dim looming through the pale, still light ! 
 
 The vague, vast grouping of a dream, 
 They stretch into the solemn night. 
 
 Winding streamlets, woodland pools and waterfalls, embow 
 ered roadsides, and the soft glow of moonlight upon the resting- 
 places of the living and the dead these are not peculiar to any 
 country these are to be found everywhere. But, because uni 
 versal, they are not less American. And the pictures herein 
 gathered have an interest of their own, as showing in what lov 
 ing manner native singer and artist have sketched peaceful nooks 
 and by-ways, such as the poets of all lands have delighted to 
 wreathe about with song. 
 
VI. 
 
 u Hark ! from the moss-clung apple-bough. 
 
 Beyond the tumbled wall, there broke 
 That gurgling music of the May 
 Twas the first robin spoke! 11 
 
 T N that subtile combination of sentiment, fancy, and insight 
 -* which gives poetry a touch of glamour, wherein illusion and 
 truth are so blended that it seems as if one could not be with 
 out the other, none among our poets surpasses Lowell. There 
 is a shimmer of mirage upon his pictures : 
 
 The light that never was on sea or land 
 
 illuminates and transfigures Nature under the magic of his pen. 
 In this respect we may say that, of all our poets, he is most 
 poetical. 
 
79 
 
 Enter with him into his &quot; woodland enchanted,&quot; where in &quot; The 
 Fountain of Youth &quot; he sees his childhood s face again a real 
 forest, and a real little spring bubbling up among its rocks and 
 mosses, yet how mystically lighted : 
 
 Tis a woodland enchanted ! 
 By no sadder spirit 
 Than blackbirds and thrushes 
 That whistle to cheer it 
 All day in the bushes, 
 This woodland is haunted : 
 And in a small clearing, 
 Beyond sight or hearing 
 Of human annoyance, 
 The little fount gushes, 
 First smoothly, then dashes 
 And gurgles and flashes, 
 To the maples and ashes 
 Confiding its joyance. 
 
 Tis a woodland enchanted ! 
 The great August noonlight 
 Through myriad rifts slanted, 
 Leaf and bole thickly sprinkles 
 With flickering gold. 
 There, in warm August gloaming, 
 With quick, silent brightenings 
 From meadow-lands roaming, 
 The firefly twinkles 
 His fitful heat-lightnings : 
 There the magical moonlight 
 11 
 
8o 
 
 With meek, saintly glory 
 Steeps summit and wold. 
 
 Tis a woodland enchanted ! 
 A vast silver willow, 
 I know not how planted 
 (This wood is enchanted, 
 And full of surprises), 
 Stands stemming a billow, 
 A motionless billow 
 Of ankle-deep mosses. 
 Two great roots it crosses 
 To make a round basin ; 
 And there the fount rises ; 
 Oh, too pure a mirror 
 For one sick of error 
 To see his sad face in ! 
 
 By my step unafifrighted, 
 A thrush hops before it, 
 
 And o er it 
 
 A birch hangs delighted, 
 Dipping, dipping, dipping its tremulous hair. 
 
 One must read the whole poem to get at the heart of its 
 beauty ; there is in poetry scarcely such another glimpse of Na 
 ture, as it appears to an idealizing child s vision, unless we may 
 find it in Mrs. Browning s &quot; Lost Bower.&quot; From both we may 
 learn, if we did not know it before, that a poet is such from the 
 very beginning from infancy itself, awake to the heaven that 
 lies about him. Almost any forest would have been fairy-land 
 
8i 
 
 Tis a woodland enchanted ! 
 By no sadder spirit 
 Than blackbirds and thrushes 
 That whistle to cheer it.&quot; 
 
82 
 
 to the moods of such children as Elizabeth Barrett and James 
 Russell Lowell. 
 
 Back to the breezy delights and the rapturous freedom of his 
 childhood, Lowell is again and again transported by the loveli 
 ness of the outer world : is not the poet indeed the immortal 
 child ? The blossoms of early summer lure him from his studies 
 as they would any schoolboy : 
 
 The dandelions and buttercups 
 Gild all the lawn ; the drowsy bee 
 Stumbles among the clover-tops, 
 And summer sweetens all but me. 
 Away, unfruitful lore of books, 
 For whose vain idiom we reject 
 The soul s more native dialect, 
 Aliens among the birds and brooks, 
 Dull to interpret or conceive 
 What gospels lost the woods retrieve ! 
 
 Snap, chord of manhood s tender strain ! 
 To-day I will be a boy again ! 
 The mind s pursuing element, 
 Like a bow slackened and unbent, 
 In some dark corner shall be leant. 
 The robin sings, as of old, from the lirnb ! 
 The catbird croons in the lilac-bush ! 
 Through the dim arbor, himself more dim, 
 Silently hops the hermit-thrush. 
 
 O unestranged birds and bees ! 
 O face of Nature always true ! 
 O never unsympathizing trees ! 
 
83 
 
 O never rejecting roof of blue ! 
 Methinks my heart from each of these 
 Plucks part of childhood back again. 
 Once more I am admitted peer 
 In the upper house of Nature here, 
 And feel through all my pulses run 
 The royal blood of breeze and sun ! 
 
 And how this poet s heart warms to the sweetness of our 
 loveliest month the month which keeps youth and poetry alive 
 in the shivering North ! 
 
 June is the pearl of our New England year. 
 
 Still a surprisal, though expected long, 
 
 Her coming startles. Long she lies in wait, 
 
 Makes many a feint, peeps forth, draws coyly back, 
 
 Then, from some southern ambush in the sky, 
 
 With one great gush of blossoms storms the world. 
 
 June is full of invitations sweet, 
 
 Forth from the chimney s yawn and thrice-read tomes, 
 
 To leisurely delights and sauntering thoughts 
 
 That brook no ceiling narrower than the blue. 
 
 The cherry, dressed for bridal, at my pane 
 
 Brushes, then listens, Will he come ? The bee 
 
 All dusty as a miller, takes his toll 
 
 Of powdery gold, and grumbles. What a day 
 
 To sun me, and do nothing ! 
 
 Hush ! tis he ! 
 
 My oriole, my glance of summer fire 
 Is come at last ! 
 
8 4 
 
 It winds athwart the windy hill. 
 Through sallow slopes of upland bare&quot; 
 
 Within-doors, Fan 
 cy has her own ave 
 nues of escape. Dream 
 land opens to him 
 through every window- 
 pane. The lightest sug 
 gestion a peep of blue 
 sky a thread of a 
 pathway winding up a 
 hill (but, indeed, what 
 outlet for the imagi 
 nation is like that of 
 an ascending hill-slope, 
 beyond which one 
 knows not what won 
 ders of earth and hea 
 ven may lie waiting 
 to be revealed ?) any 
 least hint lifts him as 
 on wings into realms 
 of unimaginable beauty. 
 
 Perhaps no poem 
 of Lowell s illustrates 
 this peculiar and un- 
 equaled quality of his 
 better than &quot; The Foot 
 path,&quot; in every way one 
 of the most exquisite 
 among all he has writ 
 ten : 
 
It winds athwart the windy hill, 
 
 Through sallow slopes of upland bare, 
 
 And Fancy climbs, with footfall still, 
 Its narrowing curves that end in air. 
 
 By day a warmer-hearted blue 
 
 Stoops softly to that topmost swell : 
 
 Its thread-like windings seem a clew 
 To gracious climes where all is well. 
 
 By night, far yonder, I surmise 
 
 An ampler world than clips my ken, 
 
 Where the great stars of happier skies 
 Commingle nobler fates of men. 
 
 The bird I list hath never come 
 Within the scope of mortal ear : 
 
 My prying step would make him dumb, 
 And the fair tree, his shelter, sear. 
 
 Behind the hill, behind the sky, 
 
 Behind my inmost thought he sings : 
 
 No feet avail ; to hear it nigh, 
 
 The song itself must lend the wings. 
 
 Sing on, sweet bird, close hid, and. raise 
 Those angel-stairways in my brain, 
 
 That climb from these low-vaulted days 
 To spacious sunshines far from pain ! 
 
 City of Elf-land, just without 
 Our seeing, marvel ever new, 
 
 Glimpsed in fair weather, a sweet doubt 
 Sketched in, mirage-like, on the blue. 
 
86 
 
 I build thee in yon sunset cloud, 
 
 Whose edge allures to climb the height ; 
 
 I hear thy drowned bells, inly-loud, 
 
 From still pools dusk with dreams of night. 
 
 Something of the same illusive charm we find in Emerson s 
 &quot; Forerunners &quot; : 
 
 Long I followed happy guides ; 
 
 I could never reach their sides. 
 
 Keen my sense, my heart was young, 
 
 Right good-will my sinews strung, 
 
 But no speed of mine avails 
 
 To hunt upon their shining trails. 
 
 On eastern hills I see their smokes 
 Mixed with mist by distant lochs. 
 
 Their near camp my spirit knows 
 By signs gracious as rainbows. 
 
 And it glimpses upon us again in Whittier s &quot; Vanishers,&quot; the 
 echo of an Indian legend : 
 
 From the clefts of mountain rocks, 
 
 Through the dark of lowland firs 
 Flash the eyes and flow the locks 
 
 Of the mystic vanishers ! 
 
 And the fisher in his skiff, 
 
 And the hunter on the moss, 
 Hear their call from cape and cliff, 
 
 See their hands the birch-leaves toss. 
 
87 
 
 Doubt who may, O friend of mine, 
 
 Thou and I have seen them too ; 
 On before, with beck and sign, 
 
 Still they glide, and we pursue. 
 
 More than clouds of purple trail 
 
 In the gold of setting day ; 
 More than gleams of wing or sail 
 
 Beckon from the sea-mist gray- 
 Beauty that eludes our grasp ; 
 
 Sweetness that transcends our taste ; 
 Loving hands we may not clasp ; 
 
 Shining feet that mock our haste. 
 
 Airily delicate as a bird s flight is the movement of some of 
 the half-hinted human forms that flit through Lowell s verses. 
 The same fairy glamour is over them that clings like a film of 
 mist to his landscape outlines. He suggests them to us in meta 
 phors drawn from the swift and transient grace we have so often 
 recognized in familiar Nature : 
 
 As a twig trembles, which a bird 
 
 Lights on to sing, then leaves unbent, 
 
 So is my memory thrilled and stirred : 
 I only know she came and went. 
 
 As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven, 
 The blue dome s measureless content, 
 
 So my soul holds that moment s heaven : 
 I only know she came and went. 
 12 
 
88 
 
 As a twig trembles, which a bird 
 Lights on to sing, then leaves unbent, 
 
 So is my memory thrilled and stirred : 
 I only know she came and went.&quot; 
 
 As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven 
 The blue dome s measureless content. 1 
 
 
 
 
 As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps 
 The orchards full of bloom and scent.&quot; 
 
8 9 
 
 As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps 
 The orchards full of bloom and scent, 
 
 So clove her May my wintry sleeps : 
 I only know she came and went. 
 
 Although the charm of dreamy remoteness wavers so often 
 over the scenery and the personages of Lowell s verse, the earth 
 is firm beneath it all. We know the landscape the banks of 
 the Charles the stately elms that embower his study, and the 
 brook that sometimes wins him a little beyond his home boun 
 daries ; and through all we feel that the singer we admire is hap 
 pily sheltered, as any of his roof-tree birds, in a sacred domestic 
 seclusion. We also know well that he can evoke beauty from 
 the homelier aspects of life and Nature, as no other has done. 
 Who else has dared bring into poetry that plain bird, the black 
 thrush, whose song is both a feline mew and an entrancing carol ? 
 
 &quot; Come forth ! &quot; my catbird calls to me, 
 
 &quot; And hear me sing a cavatina 
 That, in this old familiar tree, 
 Shall hide a garden of Alcina. 
 
 &quot; These buttercups shall brim with wine 
 Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic : 
 May not New England be divine ? 
 My ode to ripening summer classic ? 
 
 &quot; Or, if to me you will not hark, 
 
 By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing 
 Till all the alder-coverts dark 
 
 Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing.&quot; 
 
90 
 
 . Visions which are truest realities, and realities that fade away 
 into the realms of phantasy until we half doubt whether they ever 
 had a tangible existence art, poetry, and life are full of these. 
 
 After youth is past, we hold it in ideal possession still, in 
 vested with a freshness and a radiance far beyond those which it 
 brought to us in actual experience. And spring, left a little be 
 hind us, wafts a tenderer fragrance from its few early blossoms 
 than any that comes to us from the multitude of midsummer 
 flowers. 
 
 What Northern flower is fuller of poetic associations than 
 our trailing arbutus, the recluse of the bare and chilly forest, 
 hiding its delicate beauty under colorless masses of decayed leaf 
 age, breathing its unregarded perfume out into air bleak with 
 near memories of winter, and choosing often the barrenest of 
 rocky hillsides for its hermitage ? Its fragrance has found way 
 into the verses of many a poet, and is sweet indeed in Sted- 
 man s &quot;Seeking the May Flower&quot;: 
 
 To me, when in the sudden spring 
 
 I hear the earliest robin s lay, 
 With the first trill there comes again 
 
 One picture of the May. 
 
 The veil is parted wide, and lo ! 
 
 A moment though my eyelids close, 
 Once more I see that wooded hill 
 
 Where the arbutus grows. 
 
 I see the village dryad kneel, 
 
 Trailing her slender fingers through 
 The knotted tendrils, as she lifts 
 
 The pale, pink flowers to view. 
 
* Where Artichoke in shadow slides, 
 The lily on her painted tides.&quot; 1 
 
 Fresh blows the breeze through hemlock-trees, 
 The fields are edged with green below ; 
 
 And naught but youth and hope and love 
 We know, or care to know. 
 
9 2 
 
 Hark ! from the moss-clung apple-bough 
 
 Beyond the tumbled wall, there broke 
 That gurgling music of the May 
 
 Twas the first robin spoke ! 
 
 Voices and presences of human beings so intermingle them 
 selves with the manifold beauty of natural scenery, and with the 
 sounds of birds and winds and waters, it is well-nigh impossible 
 to separate them, even in imagination ; nor would we, if we could. 
 
 No landscape is wholly enjoyable without some suggestion 
 of humanity, for the loneliest and grandest wilderness somehow 
 refers itself to a gazer thereon, though coming only in the char 
 acter of a solitary and uninvited intruder. But the hills and the 
 fields which have become dear to us because of the imprint of 
 familiar footsteps, and the brooks and rivers which have seemed 
 to bear onward the syllabled utterances of friendly voices, and 
 all things in the beautiful outer world which have brought asso 
 ciations from noble or gentle lives unknown to us into our own, 
 hold us by the most powerful charm. 
 
 A sylvan stream that enters the Merrimack only a few miles 
 above its union with the sea, in the quietest of out-of-the-way 
 nooks the Artichoke glances to sight in some lovely verses by 
 Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, entitled &quot; Our Neighbor.&quot; It is 
 well understood who the &quot; neighbor &quot; is a poet, one of our most 
 beloved and honored, whose name blends naturally with the flow 
 of the Merrimack, beside which he has lived so long, and echoes 
 down the shore made musical with his songs : 
 
 From Rivermouth to Ipswich Sound ; 
 Where Salisbury sands in yellow length 
 With the great breakers measure strength ; 
 
93 
 
 and where 
 
 .... the great Cape wades to meet 
 The storms that fawn about her feet. 
 
 And the inland associations with this poet s name are pleasant 
 as the odors wafted from flowers that border the streams so dear 
 to him : 
 
 Sweeter in Follymill shall blow 
 
 The May flowers, that you loved them so. 
 
 Where Artichoke in shadow slides, 
 The lily on her painted tides, 
 There s naught in the enchanted view 
 That does not seem a part of you ; 
 Your legends hang on every hill, 
 Your songs have made it lovelier still. 
 
 We can imagine that none among his numerous septuagena 
 rian tributes could have given the poet greater pleasure than this, 
 coming as if the well-known landscape were greeting him with 
 a human voice. 
 
 Hard and cold in its features as that landscape naturally is, 
 scarcely any other portion of our country has blossomed so richly 
 with story and song, and they have left upon it a glow like the 
 tenderness of its own October haze. 
 
 Poetry is indeed most delightful for its magical suffusions, 
 wherein the heavens descend to blend themselves with this homely 
 and familiar earth of ours ; and what commonest scenery have 
 we not all sometimes seen clothed upon with the atmosphere of 
 a beatific dream ? 
 
94 
 
 VII. 
 
 &quot; The -woodlands wore a gloomy green, 
 And August hung her smoky screen.&quot;&quot; 
 
 r I &quot;HE sea is in the landscape as the sky is, being only less 
 
 1 
 
 universal. The sea liberates the eye from its bondage to 
 
 earth, which is yet the resting-place whither it gladly returns 
 from its freest flight. Nothing in Nature is so inspiriting as this 
 escape into the elements which the vast spaces of the ocean and 
 the heavens afford, and, when we do not find it in a picture, we 
 feel the omission with a sense of indefinable loss. 
 
 The ocean weaves a fringe of glory for the land, blending it 
 
95 
 
 with the infinite ether into which it widens ; but, one must stand 
 upon the shore, fully to enjoy the magnificence of the sea ; and 
 the imagery that reveals its beauty is drawn from the earth, the 
 home of the opal and the rose, as we find them in Emerson s 
 
 lovely lines : 
 
 .... Behold the sea, 
 
 The opaline, the plentiful and strong, 
 Yet beautiful as is the rose in June. 
 
 The charm of island-scenery is not always so much in itself 
 as in the expanse by which it is surrounded. The more barren 
 the island, the more wondrous the magic wrought upon it by 
 subtile fingerings of light, wandering across it from engirding dis 
 tances. Few resorts of summer tourists exhibit so little of the 
 luxuriance of Nature as the Isles of Shoals, yet few are attrac 
 tive in so simple and powerful a way. The larger of them is en 
 thusiastically described by Lowell, in his &quot; Pictures from Apple- 
 
 dore &quot; : 
 
 A common island, you will say ; 
 
 But stay a moment ; only climb 
 
 Up to the highest rock of the isle ; 
 
 Stand there alone for a little while, 
 
 And with gentle approaches it grows sublime, 
 
 Dilating slowly as you win 
 
 A sense from the silence to take it in. 
 
 So wide the loneness, so lucid the air, 
 
 The granite beneath you so savagely bare, 
 
 You well might think you were looking down 
 
 From some sky-silenced mountain s crown. 
 
 Till now, you dreamed not what could be done 
 With a bit of rock and a ray of sun. 
 
 13 
 
9 6 
 
 But look ! how fade the lights and shades 
 
 Of keen bare edge and crevice deep ! 
 
 How doubtfully it fades and fades, 
 
 And glows again, yon craggy steep, 
 
 O er which, through color s dreamiest grades, 
 
 The yellow sunbeams pause and creep ! 
 
 Now pink it blooms, now glimmers gray, 
 
 Now shadows to a filmy blue, 
 
 Tries one, tries all, but will not stay, 
 
 But flits from opal hue to hue, 
 
 And runs through every tenderest range 
 
 Of change that seems not to be change. 
 
 The island is also fortunate in being the home of a singer 
 affluent in picturesque and melodious expression, Mrs. Celia 
 Thaxter, of whose sea-swept garden the artist gives us a glimpse : 
 
 Come out into the garden, where the crimson phloxes burn, 
 And every slender lily-stem upbears a lustrous urn ! 
 
 Sunflower tall and hollyhock that wave in the wind together, 
 Corn-flower, poppy, and marigold blossoming fair and fine, 
 
 Delicate sweet-peas, glowing bright in the quiet autumn weather, 
 
 While over the fence, on fire with bloom, climbs the nasturtium-vine. 
 
 The well-tended flower-plot in the midst of the ocean gives 
 brilliant contrasts of color to its limitless gray background by 
 day, and at night the beacon-light opens like a blossom out of 
 the darkness, in the singer s fancy : 
 
 I lit the lamps in the lighthouse tower, 
 
 For the sun dropped down, and the day was dead : 
 
97 
 
 Come out into the garden, -where the crimson phloxes burn, 
 And every slender lily-stem upbears a lustrous urn I &quot; 
 
 So bleak these shores, -wind-swept, and all the year 
 Washed by the -wild Atlantic s restless tide&quot; 
 
98 
 
 They shone like a glorious clustered flower, 
 Ten golden, and five red. 
 
 In Mrs. Thaxter s poems, we traverse the little isle, through 
 its gorges and coves and grassy openings, and find an ever- 
 returning charm in the beacon-light, the anchored fishing-boats, 
 the drifting gulls, and the wild-flowers wet with salt spray, that 
 cling to rocky clefts, or gleam from the brown turf at our feet : 
 
 So bleak these shores, wind-swept, and all the year 
 Washed by the wild Atlantic s restless tide, 
 
 You would not dream that flowers the woods hold dear 
 Amid such desolation dare abide. 
 
 But May and June visit the lonely islet as well as the in 
 land forest and meadow ; and in her poem entitled &quot; Rock-Weeds,&quot; 
 as in many others, this graceful singer tells us, in a very charm 
 ing manner, how 
 
 The barren island dreams in flowers. 
 
 A murmur of the sea is in the music of all poets, even 
 though they may not live upon its borders ; for does it not re 
 verberate over the continents as with an echo from eternity ? 
 See how its morning glow is reflected in Bayard Taylor s verses : 
 
 Where yonder dancing billows dip 
 Far off, to ocean s misty verge 
 Plows Morning, like a full-sailed ship, 
 
 The Orient s cloudy surge. 
 
 
 
 With spray of scarlet fire before 
 
 The ruffled gold that round her dies, 
 
99 
 
 She sails above the sleeping shore, 
 Across the waking skies. 
 
 The dewy beach beneath her glows : 
 A penciled beam, the lighthouse burns : 
 
 Full-breathed, the fragrant sea-wind blows, 
 Life to the world returns ! 
 
 This latest-lamented among our sons of song has left behind 
 him landscape-pictures from many lands. Born in one of those 
 pleasant States midway between East and South and West, it 
 was natural that his fancies should take a wide range in his own 
 country ; and we find both shores of the hemisphere in his verse, 
 while he lingers most lovingly amid the quiet scenery of his 
 birthplace. 
 
 We are taken into the very heart of summer as we read 
 Bayard Taylor s little poem, &quot; In the Meadows.&quot; The fine artis 
 tic sense with which it is pervaded makes us at once see the 
 beauty and feel the sweetness of the season. The song is one 
 of his earliest, and shows, in its tender simplicity, the impulse 
 toward expression that was always irresistible within him : 
 
 I lie in the summer meadows, 
 
 In the meadows all alone, 
 With the infinite sky above me, 
 
 And the sun on his mid-day throne. 
 
 The smell of the flowering grasses 
 
 Is sweeter than any rose, 
 And a million happy insects 
 
 Sing in the warm repose. 
 
100 
 
 The mother-lark that is brooding, 
 Feels the sun upon her wings, 
 
 And the deeps of the noonday glitter 
 With swarms of fairy things. 
 
 &quot; / lie in the summer meadows, 
 In the meadows all alone .&quot; 
 
 From the billowy green beneath me 
 To the fathomless blue above, 
 
 The creatures of God are happy 
 
 In the warmth of their summer love. 
 
101 
 
 The infinite bliss of Nature 
 
 I feel in every vein ; 
 The light and the life of summer 
 
 Blossom in heart and brain. 
 
 His was a nature better fitted for climates of perpetual sum 
 mer, than for that into which he was born : the ardent glow of 
 the Orient seems the natural atmosphere of his verse. Yet, with 
 a poetic sensitiveness to all influences of earth and air, and with 
 the touch of an artist, he represents faithfully the spirit of what 
 ever landscape his pen may depict. He has sketched August 
 among the sunny Pennsylvanian hills with loving study, although 
 his heart seems only half at home there, but is returning to the 
 &quot; golden hills of Cos &quot; to the &quot; phantoms of Carian shores,&quot; glim 
 mering across the &quot; waveless Mediterranean sea-floor,&quot; and to the 
 islands of Patmos and Naxos 
 
 Once as I saw them sleeping, drugged with the poppy of summer. 
 
 Yet his picture of his native fields is true to the life : 
 
 Over the tasseled corn, and fields of the twice-blossomed clover, 
 Dimly the hills recede in the reek of the colorless hazes : 
 Dull and lusterless now, the burnished green of the woodlands ; 
 Leaves of blackberry-briers are bronzed and besprinkled with copper : 
 Weeds in the unmown meadows are blossoming purple and yellow, 
 Roughly entwined, a wreath for the tan and the wrinkles of summer. 
 
 The homely blossoms at his feet awaken ever some foreign 
 or classical contrast : 
 
102 
 
 Flaring St-John s-wort, milk- weed, and coarse, unpoetical mullein : 
 Yet, were it not for the poets, say, is the asphodel fairer ? 
 Were not the mullein as dear, had Theocritus sung it, or Bion ? 
 
 Nothing is quite responsive to the mood of the dreamer who 
 gazes upon some wearily familiar scene with a fairer landscape 
 gliding across his memory or his fancy. It is almost a misfor 
 tune to have seen too much, if we are thus hindered from the 
 enjoyment of what is less satisfactory, although still beautiful, in 
 our every-day surroundings. But shadows which fled before the 
 tourist poet, in his wanderings, seemed to draw nearer to him 
 at home that darkest shadow of all, which he saw lying upon 
 the churchyard roses, when 
 
 The woodlands wore a gloomy green, 
 
 The tawny stubble clad the hill, 
 And August hung her smoky screen 
 
 Above the valleys, hot and still 
 
 the shadow that even in the June-illumined meadows stole across 
 the landscape into his verse, and made him exclaim . 
 
 There s life in the summer meadows, 
 But death is in the world ! 
 
 For this glowing, light-loving spirit, all shadows are now laid 
 beneath the peaceful greenness of his native hills. Out of his 
 dust should the warmth of the rose for ever spring into bloom ! 
 
 Over the westward hills, beyond the deep-flowing Hudson, 
 come glimpses into sunny distance, and wafts of melody from 
 wayside singers. In Alfred B. Street s verses, we follow the 
 windings of forest-fringed rivers the Ausable, the Racket, the 
 
103 
 
 u The jessamine hangs golden flowers 
 On ancient oaks in moss arrayed.&quot; 
 
 14 
 
 &quot; The loveliest land that smiles beneath the sky, 
 The coast-land of our Western Italy&quot; 
 
104 
 
 Beaverkill, the Delaware and catch glimpses of pleasant inland 
 lakes Cayuga, Champlain, or Saranac. His stanzas on the &quot; Up 
 per Saranac &quot; are delightfully suggestive : 
 
 Down to thy wave the fish-hawk swoops ; 
 
 The wood-duck floats within thy bays ; 
 Its trunks the water-maple groups 
 
 Along thy banks of leafy maze. 
 
 The gull darts by, a flash of snow ; 
 
 Deep from thy brink green pictures gleam ; 
 The loon shouts o er and shoots below ; 
 
 The soft haze folds thee in a dream. 
 
 The lily lifts its creamy cup 
 
 In thy broad shallows, amber-clear ; 
 And there the thatch shoots bristling up, 
 
 And there steals down the drinking deer. 
 
 But PercivaFs &quot; Seneca Lake,&quot; familiar as it is, must always 
 be esteemed one of our finest lake-poems : 
 
 On thy fair bosom, silver lake, 
 
 The wild swan spreads his snowy sail, 
 
 And round his breast the ripples break, 
 As down he bears before the gale. 
 
 The waves along thy pebbly shore, 
 
 As blows the north wind, heave their foam, 
 
 And curl around the dashing oar 
 As late the boatman hies him home. 
 
IDS 
 
 How sweet, at set of sun, to view 
 
 Thy golden mirror, spreading wide, 
 And see the mist of mantling blue 
 
 Float round the distant mountain s side ! 
 
 From farther inland, a gleam of the Wabash opens upon us, 
 in this sonnet by Maurice Thompson : 
 
 There is a river singing in between 
 
 Bright fringes of papaw and sycamore, 
 
 That stir to fragrant winds on either shore, 
 
 Where tall blue herons stretch their necks, and lean 
 
 Over clear currents, flowing cool and thin 
 
 Through the clean furrows of the pebbly floor. 
 
 My own glad river ! though unclassic, still 
 
 Haunted of merry gods, whose pipings fill 
 
 With music all thy golden willow-brakes, 
 
 Above thee, Halcyon rears his regal crest ; 
 
 The tulip-tree flings thee its flower-flakes, 
 
 The tall flag over thee its lances shakes. 
 
 With every charm of beauty thou art blest, 
 
 O happiest river of the happy West ! 
 
 Not many of our poets have pictured the wide plains that 
 slope toward the setting sun : 
 
 .... the gardens of the desert, 
 The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, 
 For which the speech of England has no name 
 The prairies. 
 
 We get an impressive glimpse of them, however, in a sonnet 
 by John James Piatt, entitled &quot; A Mirage of the West&quot;: 
 
io6 
 
 Above the sunken sun the clouds are fired 
 With a dark splendor ; the enchanted hour 
 Works momentary miracles in the sky ; 
 Weird shadows take from fancy what they lack 
 For semblance, and I see a boundless plain, 
 A mist of sun and sheaves in boundless air, 
 Gigantic shapes of reapers moving slow 
 In some new harvest : so I can but dream 
 Of my great land, that takes its morning star 
 Out of the dusky evening of the east 
 My land, that lifted into vision gleams 
 Misty and vast. 
 
 Paul Hayne writes with enthusiasm of the South of its 
 oaks and pines and magnolias, of its waterfalls and its lapsing 
 seas. On the shores of South Carolina he sings : 
 
 I hear the inarticulate murmurs flow 
 
 Of the faint wind-tides breathing like a sea ; 
 
 When, in clear vision, softly dawns on me 
 
 The loveliest land that smiles beneath the sky, 
 
 The coast-land of our Western Italy. 
 
 I view the waters quivering ; quaff the breeze, 
 
 Whose briny raciness keeps an under-taste 
 
 Of flavorous tropic sweets, 
 
 From Cuba s perfumed groves and garden spiceries. 
 
 And among the magnolias on the Ashley River he exclaims: 
 
 Yes, found at last, the earthly paradise ! 
 Here by slow currents of the silvery stream 
 It smiles, a shining wonder, a fair dream, 
 A matchless miracle to mortal eyes. 
 
&quot;Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters , 
 Which, like a net-work of steel, extended in every direction. 1 
 
 What whorls of dazzling color flash and rise 
 From rich azalean flowers, whose petals teem 
 With such harmonious tints as brightly gleam 
 In sunset rainbows arched o er perfect skies ! 
 
 Of the almost tropical splendor of Nature in Florida and 
 
io8 
 
 Louisiana, little, comparatively, has been sung. Our artist gives 
 us an illustration of the former, suggested by verses from the 
 pen of W. H. C. Hosmer : 
 
 Where Pablo to the broad St. John 
 
 Her dark and briny tribute pays, 
 The wild deer leads her dappled fawn, 
 
 Of graceful limb and timid gaze. 
 
 The jessamine hangs golden flowers 
 
 On ancient oaks in moss arrayed ; 
 And proudly the palmetto towers, 
 
 While mock-birds warble in the shade. 
 
 Sidney Lanier writes, from the marshes of Georgia, of 
 
 Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful braided and woven 
 With intricate shades of the vines, that, myriad-cloven, 
 Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs : 
 
 but the best poetical descriptions of the lakes and bayous of 
 Louisiana are doubtless to be found in Longfellow s &quot; Evange- 
 line &quot; ; as, for instance, that of the lakes of the Atchafalaya, where 
 
 Water-lilies in myriads rocked on the slight undulations 
 
 Made by the passing oars, and, resplendent in beauty, the lotus 
 
 Lifted her golden crown above the heads of the boatmen. 
 
 Under the boughs of Wachita willows, that grew by the margin, 
 
 Safely their boat was moored : and scattered about on the greensward, 
 
 Tired with their midnight toil, the weary travelers slumbered. 
 
 Over them vast and high extended the cope of a cedar : 
 
 Swinging from its great arms, the trumpet-flower and the grape-vine 
 
109 
 
 Hung their ladder of ropes aloft like the ladder of Jacob, 
 
 On whose pendulous stairs the angels ascending, descending, 
 
 Were the swift humming-birds, that flitted from blossom to blossom 
 
 Such was the vision Evangeline saw as she slumbered beneath it. 
 
 And again, when, after gliding down the forest-shadowed river, 
 with its green islands and &quot; plume-like cotton-trees &quot;- 
 
 They emerged into broad lagoons, where silvery sand-bars 
 
 Lay in the stream, and along the wimpling waves of their margin, 
 
 Shining with snow-white plumes, large flocks of pelicans waded. 
 
 They were approaching the region where reigns perpetual summer, 
 Where through the Golden Coast, and groves of orange and citron, 
 Sweeps with majestic curve the river away to the eastward. 
 They, too, swerved from their course ; and, entering the bayou of 
 
 Plaquemine, 
 
 Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters, 
 Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction. 
 Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress 
 Met in a dusky arch, and trailing mosses in mid-air 
 Waved like banners that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals. 
 
 It is to be remembered that this vivid description is from a 
 Northern pen : the most luxuriant climates do not seem to have 
 been over-productive of poets. But in this, as in many other 
 ways, the resources of our West and South are as yet only 
 partly developed. 
 
 Certainly the poet and the painter of the future will find 
 abundant material ready for their hand, in the landscape thus far 
 so little explored for the purpose of seeing its beauty, and re 
 vealing it to the world. 
 
VIII. 
 
 White clouds, whose shadows haunt the deep, 
 Light mists, whose soft embraces keep 
 The sunshine on the hills asleep! 
 
 A S yet, only occasional glimpses of our Golden Coast have 
 /^*- found their way into the national poetry. Bret Harte has 
 given us rich specimens from more than one mine of story and 
 song on the Pacific shore has opened veins of literary wealth 
 which no hand has yet made so productive as his own. We 
 have to thank him for pictures of the strangely intermixed hu 
 man life of California, and also for suggestions of the wonderful 
 background against which it is seen 
 
Ill 
 
 The tall pines bowing where they stand, 
 
 The bared head of El Capitan ; 
 The tumult of the waterfalls, 
 
 Pohono s kerchief in the breeze, 
 The waving from the rocky walls, 
 
 The stir and rustle of the trees. 
 
 Joaquin Miller, in his several volumes, furnishes full and bril 
 liant descriptions of the plains, and canons, and mountain-ranges 
 of the Far West : 
 
 Afar the bright Sierras lie, 
 A swaying line of snowy white, 
 A fringe of heaven hung in sight 
 Against the blue base of the sky. 
 
 I look along the valley s edge, 
 
 Where swings the white road like a swell 
 
 Of surf, along a sea of sedge, 
 
 And black and brittle chaparral, 
 
 And enters like an iron wedge 
 
 Drove in the mountain dun and brown, 
 
 As if to split the hills in twain. 
 
 To east and to west, to the north and the sun, 
 Blue skies and brown grasses are wedded as one 
 And the buffalo come like a cloud on the plain, 
 Pouring on like the tide of a storm-driven main 
 And the lodge of the hunter to friend or to foe 
 Offers rest ; and unquestioned you come or you go 
 My plains of America ! seas of wild lands ! 
 I turn to you, lean to you, lift you my hands. 
 
 15 
 
112 
 
 The scenery of the Yosemite Valley, and of the Rocky 
 Mountains, although more familiar to us through art the art of 
 the painter and the engraver than through poetry, is not un- 
 frequently most vividly suggested to us in a line or two from 
 some poet who never visited the Western shores of our conti 
 nent, except in imagination. 
 
 How could we dream of a vaster forest-loneliness than is 
 hinted in Bryant s lines about 
 
 .... The continuous woods 
 Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound 
 Save its own dashings ? 
 
 Or by what route could we enter the wilds between the Missis 
 sippi River and the Pacific Ocean, and perceive their savage 
 charm, as we do through the magic of Longfellow s pen, when 
 he takes us where 
 
 .... Among the Wind River Mountains 
 Through the Sweetwater Valley precipitate leaps the Nebraska ? 
 
 Or what picture of a wilderness mountain-peak gives us such 
 an impression of sublimity as that gleam of 
 
 .... Awful Shasta s icy shrine, 
 
 in one of Whittier s hymns ? 
 
 But rural landscapes, drawn by the hand of one who has from 
 childhood loved the trees under whose shadow he writes, have a 
 peculiar attraction. The pines of Georgia rise above us in Paul 
 Hayne s poetry, and we look upon them with something of his 
 own enthusiasm : 
 
The tall pines bowing where they stand, 
 The bared head of El Capitan&quot; 
 
 Afar the bright Sierras lie, 
 A swaying line of snowy white. 
 
Tall, somber, grim, they stand with dusky gleams 
 Brightening to gold within the woodland s core, 
 Beneath the gracious noontide s tranquil beams. 
 
 A stillness strange, divine, ineffable, 
 
 Broods round and o er them in the wind s surcease, 
 And on each tinted copse and shimmering dell 
 
 Rests the mute rapture of deep-hearted peace. 
 
 Shy forms about the greenery, out and in, 
 
 Flit neath the broadening glories of the morn ; 
 The squirrel that quaint sylvan harlequin 
 
 Mounts the tall trunks, while swift as lightning born 
 Of summer mists, from tangled vine and tree 
 
 Dart the dove s pinions, pulsing vividly 
 Down the dense glades, till glimmering far and gray, 
 
 The dusky vision softly melts away. 
 
 Penetrating with him his hilly Southern woods, the thunders 
 of the Falls of Tallulah burst upon us, the mingled roar of &quot; five 
 infuriate torrents &quot; : 
 
 From ledge to ledge the impetuous current sweeps, 
 
 For ever tortured, tameless, unsubdued, 
 
 Amid the darkly humid solitude ; 
 
 Through waste and turbulent deeps 
 
 It cleaves a terrible pathway, overrun 
 
 Only by doubtful flickering of the sun, 
 
 To meet with swift cross-eddies, whirlpools set 
 
 On verges of some measureless abyss. 
 
 Or, ascending with him the summits of the Blue Ridge, 
 touched with the early tints of autumn, we are shown that 
 
The rainbows of the heaven are not more rare, 
 More various, or more beautiful to view, 
 Than these rich forest rainbows, dipped in dew 
 Of morn and evening, glimmering everywhere 
 From wooded dell to dark-blue mountain mere. 
 
 A brilliant &quot; Bit of Autumn Color,&quot; which found its inspira 
 tion at the same beautiful season, among the same peaks, is 
 from the pen of Mrs. Margaret J. Preston : 
 
 Centered upon a sloping crest, I gazed 
 
 As one enchanted. The horizon s ring 
 
 Of billowy mountains, flushed with sunsetting, 
 
 Islanded me about, and held me mazed, 
 
 With beauty saturate. Never color blazed 
 
 On any mortal palette that could fling 
 
 Such golden glamour over everything 
 
 As flashed from autumn s prism, till all was hazed 
 
 With opal, amber, emerald, amethyst, 
 
 That shimmered, mingled, dusked to steely blue. 
 
 Our elder poets, Bryant, Halleck, and others, have delighted 
 to sketch mountain-outlines in their verses the Berkshire Hills, 
 the Catskills, and the Highlands of the Hudson. What echo 
 from our childhood is more familiar than Drake s lines 
 
 The moon looks down on old Cro nest : 
 She mellows the shades on his shaggy breast, 
 And seems his huge gray form to throw 
 In a silver cone on the wave below ? 
 
 And Halleck s &quot; Weehawken &quot; is far too beautiful ever to be 
 forgotten : 
 
n6 
 
 Weehawken, in thy mountain-scenery yet 
 
 All we adore of Nature in her wild 
 And frolic hour of infancy is met ; 
 
 And never has a summer s morning smiled 
 Upon a lovelier scene than the full eye 
 Of the enthusiast revels on, when high 
 
 Amid thy forest-solitudes, he climbs 
 
 O er crags that proudly tower above the deep, 
 
 And knows the sense of danger which sublimes 
 The breathless moment, when his daring step 
 
 Is on the verge of the cliff, and he can hear 
 
 The low dash of the wave, with startled ear. 
 
 In such an hour he turns, and on his view, 
 Ocean and earth and heaven burst before him, 
 
 Clouds slumber at his feet, and the clear blue 
 Of summer s sky,, in beauty bending o er him 
 
 The city bright below, and far away, 
 
 Sparkling in golden light, his own romantic bay. 
 
 A delicate, impalpable tenderness, as of a midsummer haze, 
 seems to cling about Whittier s &quot; Noon at the Lake-side,&quot; 
 written on the border of the hill-encircled Winnepesaukee : 
 
 White clouds, whose shadows haunt the deep, 
 Light mists, whose soft embraces keep 
 The sunshine on the hills asleep ! 
 
 O isles of calm ! O dark, still wood ! 
 And stiller skies, that overbrood 
 Your rest with deeper quietude ! 
 
O shapes and hues, dim beckoning through 
 Yon mountain- gaps, my longing view 
 Beyond the purple and the blue, 
 
 . 
 
 ^, 
 
 &quot; Gone has Spring, with all its flowers, 
 
 And gone the Summer s pomp and show. 
 
 To stiller sea and greener land, 
 
 And softer lights and airs more bland, 
 
 And skies the hollow of God s hand ! 
 
 Transfused through you, O mountain- friends 
 With mine your solemn spirit blends, 
 And life no more hath separate ends. 
 
n8 
 
 I read each misty mountain-sign ; 
 I know the voice of wave and pine, 
 And I am yours, and ye are mine. 
 
 In various songs by the same poet we have the richness of 
 late summer glowingly depicted, and its gradual passing into the 
 gorgeous colors of autumn, that lose themselves in somber 
 changes before the blank whiteness of winter falls upon them. 
 How the tardy glories of midsummer kindle beneath his touch ! 
 
 Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold 
 That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought, 
 Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod, 
 And the red pennons of the cardinal-flowers 
 Hang motionless upon their upright staves. 
 
 And, further on in the season, how lovingly are the blossoms 
 remembered, though now only lingering phantoms, faded and 
 tattered, in their wayside haunts ! 
 
 Along the river s summer walk, 
 
 The withered tufts of asters nod ; 
 And trembles on its arid stalk 
 
 The hoar plume of the golden-rod. 
 And on a ground of somber fir, 
 And azure-studded juniper, 
 The silver birch its buds of purple shows ; 
 And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild rose ! 
 
 Sad as a sighing wind the voice of the poet is heard in the 
 fading fields he has loved : 
 
Gone has Spring, with all its flowers, 
 
 And gone the Summer s pomp and show, 
 
 And Autumn, in his leafless bowers, 
 Is waiting for the Winter s snow. 
 
 But autumn in the North is far from being a season of 
 gloom, and no one has pictured its brightness and cheer with 
 more delightful effect than Whittier himself; as, for instance, in 
 one of his earlier poems, &quot; The Huskers &quot; : 
 
 It was late in mild October, and the long autumnal rain 
 Had left the summer harvest-fields all green with grass again ; 
 The first sharp frost had fallen, leaving all the woodlands gay 
 With the hues of summer s rainbow, or the meadow-flowers of May. 
 
 Through a thin, dry mist, that morning, the sun rose broad and red ; 
 
 At first a rayless disk of fire, he brightened as he sped ; 
 
 Yet even his noontide glory fell chastened and subdued 
 
 On the cornfields and the orchards, and the softly pictured wood. 
 
 And all that quiet afternoon, slow sloping to the night, 
 He wove, with golden shuttle, the haze with yellow light ; 
 Slanting through the painted beeches, he glorified the hill ; 
 And beneath it pond and meadow lay brighter, greener still. 
 
 And shouting boys, in woodland haunts, caught glimpses of that sky, 
 Flecked by the many-tinted leaves, and laughed, they knew not why. 
 And schoolgirls, gay with aster-flowers, beside the meadow-brooks, 
 Mingled the glow of autumn with the sunshine of sweet looks. 
 
 No season has been sung by our poets more frequently, or 
 more satisfactorily, than this. It is, indeed, the most poetic time 
 of the year, in its lingering, changeful, suggestive beauty in its 
 
 16 
 
120 
 
 Farewell the forest-shade, the twilight grove^ 
 The turfy path with fern and flowers inwove&quot; 
 
 splendor and its pathos. Even November, proverbially a dreary 
 month, has unfolded from its gray shroud many a revelation of 
 
121 
 
 * 
 
 unexpected beauty for eyes that were open to see. When the 
 blaze of October magnificence has passed, the simpler and no 
 bler elements of the landscape assert themselves ; leafless boughs 
 shade into a tender, cloud-like mistiness ; and the quiet tints of 
 olive, and bronze, and dead gold, that linger upon the more te 
 nacious foliage, subdue and enrich even common scenery, ideal 
 izing it into something far beyond itself. In such days we seem 
 to walk in a transfigured world. 
 
 Of the poems written on this autumn season, &quot; A Still Day 
 in Autumn,&quot; by Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman recently deceased- 
 is one of the loveliest : 
 
 I love to wander through the woodlands hoary 
 
 In the soft gloom of an autumnal day, 
 When Summer gathers up her robes of glory, 
 
 And, like a dream of beauty, glides away. 
 
 How through each loved, familiar path she lingers, 
 
 Serenely smiling through the golden mist, 
 Tinting the wild grape with her dewy fingers, 
 
 Till the cool emerald turns to amethyst ! 
 
 Warm lights are on the sleepy uplands waning 
 Beneath dark clouds along the horizon rolled, 
 
 Till the slant sunbeams, through their fringes raining, 
 Bathe all the hills in melancholy gold. 
 
 The little birds upon the hillside lonely, 
 
 Flit noiselessly along from spray to spray, 
 Silent as a sweet, wandering thought, that only 
 
 Shows its bright wings, and softly glides away. 
 
122 
 
 Although she too sings sadly, after the leaves have fallen : 
 
 Farewell the forest-shade, the twilight grove, 
 The turfy path with fern and flowers inwove. 
 
 She sometimes shows the dark month under a rare illumina 
 tion, as in her &quot; November Landscape on the Moshassuck &quot; : 
 
 How like a rich and gorgeous picture hung 
 
 In memory s storied hall seems that fair scene 
 
 O er which long years their mellowing tints have flung ! 
 
 The wayside flowers had faded, one by one ; 
 
 Hoar were the hills, the meadows drear and dun, 
 
 When homeward wending, neath the dusky screen 
 
 Of the autumnal woods, at close of day, 
 
 As o er a pine-clad height my pathway lay, 
 
 Lo ! at a sudden turn, the vale below 
 
 Lay far outspread, all flushed with purple light : 
 
 Gray rocks and umbered woods gave back the glow 
 
 Of the last day-beams, fading into night 
 
 The poet Lowell can write in his &quot; Palinode &quot; 
 
 .... Tis autumn now 
 On field and hill, in heart and brain ; 
 
 but his &quot; Indian Summer Reverie &quot; fairly blazes with the glory 
 of the passing year. Birch and maple and sumach and scarlet- 
 oak, glow upon his illuminated pages with unique and dazzling 
 metaphors : 
 
 The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 
 Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, 
 
I2 3 
 
 And hints at her foregone gentilities 
 With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves ; 
 The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, 
 Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, 
 As one who proudlier to a fallen fortune cleaves. 
 
 &quot;.... Tis autumn now 
 On field and kill, in heart and brain. 
 
 He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, 
 Who, mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, 
 Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt, 
 
124 
 
 With distant eye broods over other sights 
 Sees the hushed wood the city s flare replace, 
 The wounded turf heal o er the mill-way s trace, 
 And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights. 
 
 The ash her purple drops forgivingly 
 And sadly, breaking not the general hush : 
 
 The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea 
 Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush. 
 
 These colors are not too high for the reality ; and the mate 
 rial which might be drawn upon for illustration of our general 
 subject seems wellnigh inexhaustible. 
 
 Yet, lovingly though our poets have depicted Nature, as they 
 have witnessed her peculiar aspects in their own land, there is, in 
 her infinite variety, abundant inspiration for poets yet unborn. 
 Our Western World has not yet unfolded half its wealth of sub 
 lime and beautiful scenery, most of which has only come to light 
 in the search for more palpable treasures. 
 
 And even familiar paths, and the phases of recurring seasons, 
 have always something new to unveil to the eye of genius, 
 opening upon them for the first time. No region that poetry 
 has once glorified, if left undesecrated, can ever lose its wealth. 
 
 It is poetry that guides the hand of the artist, even as it 
 opens the lips of the singer, in the presence of beauty, however 
 made visible. And as artist and poet see and work together in 
 reverent brotherhood, our country will grow more nobly worthy, 
 through fresh creations of genius, to bear the name received 
 from its earliest discoverers the New World. 
 
 THE END. 
 

 
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