What visionary tints the year puts on,
          When failing leaves falter through motionless air
            Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!
          How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,
            As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills
            The bowl between me and those distant hills,
          And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

            No more the landscape holds its wealth apart.
          Making me poorer in my poverty,
            But mingles with my senses and my heart;
          My own projected spirit seems to me
            In her own reverie the world to steep;
            'Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep,
          Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill, and tree.

            How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,
          Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms,
            Each into each, the hazy distances!
          The softened season all the landscape charms;
            Those hills, my native village that embay,
            In waves of dreamier purple roll away,
          And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

            Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee
          Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves;
            The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory
          Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves
            Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye
            Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by,
          So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.

            The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,
          Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates,
            Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,
          Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits;
            Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails;
            Silently overhead the henhawk sails,
          With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.

            The sobered robin, hunger-silent now,
          Leeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer;
              The squirrel on the shingly shagbark's bough,
          Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear,
            Then drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound,
            Whisks to his winding fastness underground;
          The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.

            O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows
          Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call
            Creeps, faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;
          The single crow a single caw lets fall
            And all around me every bush and tree
            Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will
          Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

            The birch, most shy and lady-like of trees,
          Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,
            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 falling fortune cleaves

            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,
          With distant eye broods over other sights,
            Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace,
            The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace,
          And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

            The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost,
          And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry,
            After the first betrayal of the frost,
          Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky;
            The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold,
            To the faint Summer, beggared now and old,
          Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring eye.

            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;
            All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze;
            Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days,
          Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

            O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone,
          Where vines, and weeds, and scrub-oaks intertwine
            Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone
          Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine,
            The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves
            A prickly network of ensanguined leaves;
          Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.

            Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary,
          Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's foot,
            Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye,
          Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot,
            The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires.
            Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires;
          In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.

            Below, the Charles—a stripe of nether sky,
          Now hid by rounded apple-trees between,
            Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by,
          Now flickering golden through a woodland screen,
            Then spreading out at his next turn beyond,
            A silver circle like an inland pond—
          Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.

            Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight
          Who cannot in their various incomes share,
            From every season drawn, of shade and light,
          Who sees in them but levels brown and bare;
            Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free
            On them its largesse of variety,
          For nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.

            In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green,
          O'er which the light winds run with glimmering feet;
            Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen
          here, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet;
            And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd,
            As if the silent shadow of a cloud
          Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.

            All round, upon the river's slippery edge,
          Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide,
            Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge;
          Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide,
            Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun,
            And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run
          Of dimpling light, and with the current seem to glide.

            In Summer 'tis a blithesome sight to see,
          As step by step, with measured swing, they pass,
            The wide-ranked mowers evading to the knee,
          Their sharp scythes panting through the thick-set grass
            Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring,
            Their nooning take, while one begins to sing
          A stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky of brass.

            Meanwhile the devil-may-care, the bobolink,
               Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops
            Just ere he sweeps O'er rapture's tremulous brink,
          And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops,
            A decorous bird of business, who provides
            For his brown mate and fledglings six besides,
          And looks from right to left, a farmer mid his crops.

            Another change subdues them in the Fall,
          But saddens not, they still show merrier tints,
            Though sober russet seems to cover all;
          When the first sunshine through their dew-drops glints,
            Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across,
            Redeems with rarer hues the season's loss,
          As Dawn's feet there had touched and left their rosy prints.

            Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest,
          Lean o'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill,
            While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west,
          Glow opposite; the marshes drink their fill
            And swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade
            Through pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade,
          Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simond's darkening hill.

            Later, and yet ere Winter wholly shuts,
          Ere through the first dry snow the runner grates,
            And the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts,
          While the firmer ice the eager boy awaits,
            Trying each buckle and strap beside the fire,
            And until bedtime—plays with his desire,
          Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates;—

            Then, every morn, the river's banks shine bright
          With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail,
            By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night,
          "Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail,
            Giving a pretty emblem of the day
            When guitar arms in light shall melt away,
          And states shall move free limbed, loosed from war's cramping
          mail.

            And now those waterfalls the ebbing river
          Twice everyday creates on either side
            Tinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they shiver
          In grass-arched channels to the sun denied;
            High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow,
            The silvered flats gleam frostily below,
          Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the glassy tide.

            But, crowned in turn by vying seasons three,
          Their winter halo hath a fuller ring;
            This glory seems to rest immovably,—
          The others were too fleet and vanishing;
            When the hid tide is at its highest flow,
            O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow
          With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything.

            The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind,
          As pale as formal candles lit by day;
            Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind;
          The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play,
            Show pearly breakers combing o'er their lee,
            White crests as of some just enchanted sea,
          Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway.

            But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant,
          From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains
            Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt,
          And the roused Charles remembers in his veins
            Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost,
            That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost
          In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns.

            Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device,
          With leaden pools between or gullies bare,
            The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice;
          No life, no sound, to break the grim despair,
            Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff
            Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff,
          Or ashen the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there.

            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.

          "There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
          Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on,
          Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,
          Is some of it pr——  No, 'tis not even prose;
          I'm speaking of metres; some poems have welled
          From those rare depths of soul that have ne'er been excelled;
          They're not epics, but that doesn't matter a pin,
          In creating, the only hard thing's to begin;
          A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak,
          If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke;
          In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter,
          But thrown in a heap with a crash and a clatter
          Now it is not one thing nor another alone
          Makes a poem, but rather the general tone,
          The something pervading, uniting, the whole,
          The before unconceived, unconceivable soul,
          So that just in removing this trifle or that, you
          Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue;
          Roots, wood, bark, and leaves, singly perfect may be,
          But, clapt bodge-podge together, they don't make a tree.

          "But, to come back to Emerson, (whom by the way,
          I believe we left waiting,)—his is, we may say,
          A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range
          Has Olympus for one pole, for t' other the Exchange;
          Life, nature, lore, God, and affairs of that sort,
          He looks at as merely ideas; in short,
          As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet,
          Of such vast extent that our earth's a mere dab in it;
          Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,
          Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer;
          You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration,
          Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion,
          With the quiet precision of science he'll sort em,
          But you can't help suspecting the whole a post mortem.

          "There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,
          As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,
          Save when by reflection 'tis kindled o' nights,
          With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Nights.
          He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation,

          (There's no doubt that he stands in supreme iceolation,)
          Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,
          But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on—
          He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:
          Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has em,
          But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;
          If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,
          Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.

          "He is very nice reading in summer, but inter
          Nos, we don't want extra freezing in winter;
          Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,
          When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.
          But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right good in
          him,
          He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;
          And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or where'er it is,
          Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities,
          To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?
          No, to old Berkshire's hills, with their lime stone and
          granite.

          "There is Whinier, whose swelling and vehement heart
          Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,
          And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect,
          Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;
          There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing
          Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing;
          And his failures arise, (though perhaps he don't know it,)
          From the very same cause that has made him a poet,—
          A fervor of mind which knows no separation
          'Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration,
          As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing
          If 'twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing;
          Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction
          And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,
          While, borne with the rush of the metre along,
          The poet may chance to go right or go wrong,
          Content with the whirl and delirium of song;
          Then his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes,
          And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes,
          Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heats
          When the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats
          And can ne'er be repeated again any more
          Than they could have been carefully plotted before
          "All honor and praise to the right-hearted bard
          Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard,
          Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave
          When to look but a protest in silence was brave;

          'There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare
          That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;
          A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,
          So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet,
          Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;
          'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,
          With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood
          Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,
          With a single anemone trembly and rathe;
          His strength is so tender; his wildness so meek,
          That a suitable parallel sets one to seek—
          He's a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck;
          When nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
          For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,
          So, to fill out her model, a little she spared
          From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared.
          And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
          For making him fully and perfectly man.
          The success of her scheme gave her so much delight,
          That she tried it again, shortly after, in Dwight,
          Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay,
          She sang to her work in her sweet childish way,
          And found, when she'd put the last touch to his soul,
          That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole.

          "Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show
          He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so;
          If a person prefer that description of praise,
          Why, a coronet's certainly cheaper than bays;
          But he need take no pains to convince us he's not
          (As his enemies say) the American Scott.
          Choose any twelve men, and let C. read aloud
          That one of his novels of which he's most proud,
          And I'd lay any bet that, without ever quitting
          Their box, they'd be all, to a man, for acquitting.
          He has drawn you he's character, though, that is new,
          One wildflower he's plucked that is wet with the dew
          Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince,
          He has done naught but copy it ill ever since;
          His Indians, with proper respect be it said,
          Are just Natty Bumpo daubed over with red,
          And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat,
          Rigged up in duck pants and a sou'-wester hat,
          (Though once in a Coffin, a good chance was found
          To have slipt the old fellow away underground.)
          All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks
          The derniere chemise of a man in a fix,
          (As a captain besieged, when his garrison's small,
          bets up caps upon poles to be seen o'er the wall;)
          And the women he draws from one model don't vary,
          All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.
          When a character's wanted, he goes to the task
          As a cooper would do in composing a cask;
          He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful,
          Just hoops them together as tight as is needful,
          And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, he
          Has made at the most something wooden and empty.

          "Don't suppose I would underrate Cooper's abilities
          If I thought you'd do that, I should feel very ill at ease;
          The men who have given to one character life
          And objective existence, are not very rife,
          You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers,
          Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers,
          And Natty won't go to oblivion quicker
          Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar.

          "There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is
          That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis,
          Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity,
          He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity.
          Now he may overcharge his American pictures,
          But you'll grant there's a good deal of truth in his
          strictures;
          And I honor the man who is willing to sink
          Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
          And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
          Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak,
          Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,
          Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.

          "There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
          Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
          Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
          In a way to make people of common-sense damn metres,
          Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
          But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,
          Who—but hey-day!  What's this?  Messieurs Mathews and Poe,
          You mustn't fling mud-balls at Longfellow so,
          Does it make a man worse that his character's such
          As to make his friends love him (as you thin) too much?
          Why, there is not a bard at this moment alive
          More willing than he that his fellows should thrive,
          While you are abusing him thus, even now
          He would help either one of you out of a dough;
          You may say that he's smooth and all that till you're hoarse
          But remember that elegance also is force;
          After polishing granite as much as you will,
          The heart keeps its tough old persistency still;
          Deduct all you can that still keeps you at bay,
          Why, he'll live till men weary of Collins and Gray.

          'Tis truth that I speak
          Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek,
          I believe that his exquisite sense would scarce change a line
          In that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral Evangeline.
          That's not ancient nor modern, its place is apart
          Where time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art,
          'Tis a shrine of retreat from Earth's hubbub and strife
          As quiet and chaste as the author's own life.

          "What!  Irving? thrice welcome, warm heart and fine brain,
          You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain,
          And the gravest sweet humor, that ever were there
          Since Cervantes met death in his gentle despair;
          Nay, don't be embarrassed, nor look so beseeching,—
          I shan't run directly against my own preaching,
          And, having just laughed at their Raphaels and Dantes,
          Go to setting you up beside matchless Cervantes;
          But allow me to speak what I honestly feel,—
          To a true poet-heart add the fun of Dick Steele,
          Throw in all of Addison, minus the chill,
          With the whole of that partnership's stock and good will,
          Mix well, and while stirring, hum o'er, as a spell,
          The fine old English Gentleman, simmer it well,
          Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain
          That only the finest and clearest remain,
          Let it stand out of doors till a soul it receives
          From the warm lazy sun loitering down through green leaves,
          And you'll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving
          A name either English or Yankee,—just Irving.

          "There's Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit;
          A Leyden-jar always full-charged, from which flit
          The electrical tingles of hit after hit;
          In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invites
          A thought of the way the new Telegraph writes,
          Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully
          As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully,
          And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning
          Would flame in for a second and give you fright'ning.
          He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre,
          But many admire it, the English pentameter,
          And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse,
          With less nerve, swing, and fire in the same kind of verse,
          Nor e'er achieved aught in 't so worthy of praise
          As the tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise.
          You went crazy last year over Bulwer's New Timon;
          Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on,
          Heaping verses on verses and tames upon tomes,
          He could ne'er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes.
          His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric
          Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyric
          In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes
          That are trodden upon are your own or your foes'.

          "There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb
          With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme,
          He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
          But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders
          The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
          Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;
          His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,
          But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell
          And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem,
          At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem.

          "My friends, in the happier days of the muse,
          We were luckily free from such things as reviews,
          Then naught came between with its fog to make clearer
          The heart of the poet to that of his hearer;
          Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and they
          Felt that they, too, were poets in hearing his lay;
          Then the poet was prophet, the past in his soul
          Pre-created the future, both parts of one whole;
          Then for him there was nothing too great or too small.
          For one natural deity sanctified all;
          Then the bard owned no clipper and meter of moods
          Save the spirit of silence that hovers and broods
          O'er the seas and the mountains, the rivers and woods
          He asked not earth's verdict, forgetting the clods,
          His soul soared and sang to an audience of gods.
          'Twas for them that he measured the thought and the line,
          And shaped for their vision the perfect design,
          With as glorious a foresight, a balance as true,
          As swung out the worlds in the infinite blue;
          Then a glory and greatness invested man's heart
          The universal, which now stands estranged and apart,
          In the free individual moulded, was Art;
          Then the forms of the Artist seemed thrilled with desire
          For something as yet unattained, fuller, higher,
          As once with her lips, lifted hands, and eyes listening,
          And her whole upward soul in her countenance glistening,
          Eurydice stood—like a beacon unfired,
          Which, once touched with flame, will leap heav'nward inspired—
          And waited with answering kindle to mark
          The first gleam of Orpheus that pained the red Dark.
          Then painting, song, sculpture, did more than relieve
          the need that men feel to create and believe,
          And as, in all beauty, who listens with love
          Hears these words oft repeated—'beyond and above.'
          So these seemed to be but the visible sign
          Of the grasp of the soul after things more divine;
          They were ladders the Artist erected to climb
          O'er the narrow horizon of space and of time,
          And we see there the footsteps by which men had gained
          To the one rapturous glimpse of the never-attained,
          As shepherds could erst sometimes trace in the sod
          The last spurning print of a sky-cleaving god.

                    Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
                      Long has it waved on high,
                    And many an eye has danced to see
                      That banner in the sky;
                    Beneath it rung the battle shout,
                      And burst the cannon's roar;—
                    The meteor of the ocean air
                      Shall sweep the clouds no more!

                    Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
                      Where knelt the vanquished foe,
                    When winds were hurrying o'er the floods
                      And waves were white below,
                    No more shall feel the victor's tread,
                      Or know the conquered knee;—
                    The harpies of the shore shall pluck
                      The eagle of the sea!

                    O better that her shattered hulk
                      Should sink beneath the wave;
                    Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
                      And there should be her grave;
                    Nail to the mast her holy flag,
                      Set every threadbare sail,
                    And give her to the god of storms,
                      The lightning and the gale!

                         I saw him once before,
                         As he passed by the door,
                         And again
                         The pavement stones resound,
                         As he totters o'er the ground
                         With his cane.

                         They say that in his prime,
                         Ere the pruning-knife of Time
                         Cut him down,
                         Not a better man was found,
                         By the Crier on his round
                         Through the town.

                         But now he walks the streets,
                         And he looks at all he meets
                         Sad and wan,
                         And he shakes his feeble head,
                         That it seems as if he said,
                         "They are gone."

                         The mossy marbles rest
                         On the lips that he has prest
                         In their bloom,
                         And the names he loved to hear
                         Have been carved for many a year
                         On the tomb.

                         My grandmamma has said—
                         Poor old lady, she is dead
                         Long ago—
                         That he had a Roman nose,
                         And his cheek was like a rose
                         In the snow.

                         But now his nose is thin,
                         And it rests upon his chin
                         Like a staff,
                         And a crock is in his back,
                         And a melancholy crack
                         In his laugh.

                         I know it is a sin
                         For me to sit and grin
                         At him here;
                         But the old three-cornered hat,
                         And the breeches, and all that,
                         Are so queer!

                         And if I should live to be
                         The last leaf upon the tree
                         In the spring,
                         Let them smile, as I do now,
                         At the old forsaken bough
                         Where I cling.

               My aunt! my dear unmarried aunt!
                 Long years have o'er her flown;
               Yet still she strains the aching clasp
                 That binds her virgin zone;
               I know it hurts her,—though she looks
                 As cheerful as she can;
               Her waist is ampler than her life,
                 For life is but a span.

               My aunt! my poor deluded aunt!
                 Her hair is almost gray;
               Why will she train that winter curl
                 In such a spring-like way?
               How can she lay her glasses down,
                 And say she reads as well,
               When through a double convex lens,
                 She just makes out to spell?

               Her father—grandpapa! forgive
                 This erring lip its smiles—
               Vowed she should make the finest girl
                 Within a hundred miles;
               He sent her to a stylish school;
                 'Twas in her thirteenth June;
               And with her, as the rules required,
                 "Two towels and a spoon."

               They braced my aunt against a board,
                 To make her straight and tall;
               They laced her up, they starved her down,
                 To make her light and small;
               They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,
                 They screwed it up with pins;—
               O never mortal suffered more
                 In penance for her sins.

               So, when my precious aunt was done,
                 My grandsire brought her back;
               (By daylight, lest some rabid youth
                 Might follow on the track;)
               "Ah!" said my grandsire, as he shook
                 Some powder in his pan,
               "What could this lovely creature do
                 Against a desperate man!"

               Alas! nor chariot, nor barouche,
                 Nor bandit cavalcade,
               Tore from the trembling father's arms
                 His all-accomplished maid.
               For her how happy had it been!
                 And Heaven had spared to me
               To see one sad, ungathered rose
                 On my ancestral tree.

          This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
            Sails the unshadowed main,—
            The venturous bark that flings
          On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
          In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
            And coral reefs lie bare,
          Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

          Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
            Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
            And every chambered cell,
          Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
          As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
            Before thee lies revealed,—
          Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

          Year after year beheld the silent toil
            That spread his lustrous coil;
            Mill, as the spiral grew,
          He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
          Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
            Built up its idle door,
          Stretched m his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

          Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
            Child of the wandering sea,
            Cast from her lap, forlorn!
          From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
          Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
            While on mine ear it rings,
          Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—

          Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
            As the swift seasons roll!
            Leave thy low-vaulted past!
          Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
          Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
            Till thou at length art free,
          Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!