Pining for rain,—to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eye 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.

VOL. I.

12

So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall,

As the Gipsy child grows that eats crusts in the

hall;

It sucked the whole strength of the earth and the

sky,

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, all brought it sup ply;

'Twas a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there, A true part of the landscape as sea, land, and

air;

For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was To force up these wild births of the woods under glass,

And so, if 'tis told as it should be told,

Though 'twere sung under Venice's moonlight of gold,

You would hear the old voice of its mother, the

pine,

Murmur sealike and northern through every line, And the verses should hang, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody,

Like the lithe sun-steeped limbs of the parent tree.

Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food For their grim roots is left when the thousandyeared wood

The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing

From Michael's white shoulder-is hewn and de

faced

By iconoclast axes in desperate waste,

And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long,
Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song?
Then the legends go with them,-

sea

-even yet on the

A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree,

And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the

core

With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.

Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never let in,
Since the day of creation, the light and the din
Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed

From the midnight primeval its armful of shade,
And has kept the weird Past with its sagas alive
'Mid the hum and the stir of To-day's busy hive,
There the legend takes root in the age-gathered
gloom,

And its murmurous boughs for their tossing find

room.

Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he

goes

Groping down to the sea 'neath his mountainous

snows;

Where the lake's frore Sahara of never-tracked

white,

When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night

With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost,

As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost; Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires which 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 that venture not down Through the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town,