But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes; The early evening with her misty dyes

Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, And tones the landscape down, and soothes the wearied eyes.

There gleams my native village, dear to me, Though higher change's waves each day are

seen,

Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, Sanding with houses the diminished green;

There, in red brick, which softening time defies, Stand square and stiff the Muses' factories ;How with my life knit up is every well-known scene!

Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow To outward sight, and through your marshes

wind;

Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago,

Your twin flows silent through my world of mind:

Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray!
Before my inner sight ye stretch away,

And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.

Beyond that hillock's house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise,

Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and

praise,

Where dust and mud the equal year divide,

There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died,

Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined

gaze.

Virgilium vidi tantum,—I have seen But as a boy, who looks alike on all,

That-misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;— Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame That thither many times the Painter came ;One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.

Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow,— Our only sure possession is the past;

The village blacksmith died a month ago, And dim to me the forge's roaring blast; Soon fire-new medievals we shall see

Oust the black smithy from its chestnut tree, And that hewn down, perhaps, the beehive green and vast.

How many times, prouder than king on throne, Loosed from the village school-dame's A-s and B-s,

Panting have I the creaky bellows blown, And watched the pent volcano's red increase, Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down

By that hard arm voluminous and brown, From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.

Dear native town! whose choking elms each

year

With eddying dust before their time turn gray,

Pining for rain,-to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day,

And when the westering sun half-sunken burns, The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away,

So palpable, I've seen those unshorn few, The six old willows at the causey's end,

(Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew,)

Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send,

Striped, here and there, with many a longdrawn thread,

Where streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red,

Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird's flashes blend.

Yes, dearer far thy dust than all that e'er, Beneath the awarded crown of victory, Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer; Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three,

Yet collegisse juvat, I am glad

That here what colleging was mine I had,It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!

Nearer art thou than simply native earth, My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie; A closer claim thy soil may well put forth, Something of kindred more than sympathy; For in thy bounds I reverently laid away That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,

That portion of my life more choice to me (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole) Than all the imperfect residue can be ;The Artist saw his statue of the soul

Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke, The earthen model into fragments broke, And without her the impoverished seasons roll.

THE GROWTH OF THE LEGEND.

A FRAGMENT.

A LEGEND that grew in the forest's hush
Slowly as tear-drops gather and gush,
When a word some poet chanced to say
Ages ago, in his careless way,

Brings our youth back to us out of its shroud
Clearly as under yon thunder-cloud

I see that white sea-gull. It grew and grew,
From the pine-trees gathering a sombre hue,
Till it seems a mere murmur out of the vast
Norwegian forests of the past;

And it grew itself like a true Northern pine,
First a little slender line,

Like a mermaid's green eyelash, and then anon
A stem that a tower might rest upon,

Standing spear-straight in the waist-deep moss,
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;

Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine,
To shrunk snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the

brine,

Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor,

Hearing waves moan again on the perilous shore Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow groped its

way

"Twixt the frothy gnashed tusks of some shipcrunching bay.