Nor Hawthorne's manse, with ancient moss bespread,

Nor Irving's hollow, is with rest so rife

As this calm haven, where the leaves are shed

Round Indian summers of a golden life.

BEDTIME

'Tis bedtime; say your hymn, and bid Good-night;

God bless Mamma, Papa, and dear ones all."

Your half-shut eyes beneath your eyelids fall,

Another minute, you will shut them quite. Yes, I will carry you, put out the light, And tuck you up, although you are so tall!

What will you give me, sleepy one, and call

My wages, if I settle you all right?
I laid her golden curls upon my arm,
I drew her little feet within my hand,
Her rosy palms were joined in trustful bliss,
Her heart next mine beat gently, soft and

Beneath the thick yews' shade,

For shelter when the rains and winds pre

vail.

It cannot be the eye

Is blinded when we die,

So that we know no more at all
The dawns increase, the evenings fall;
Shut up within a mouldering chest of wood
Asleep, and careless of our children's good.

Shall I not feel the spring,

The yearly resurrection of the earth,
Stir thro' each sleeping thing

With the fair throbbings and alarms of birth,

Calling new lustre to the maiden's eye, And to the youth love and ambition high?

Or should my children's tread

And in a marble urn

Or in the sweet cold earth I pass from death to birth,

And pay kind Nature's life-long debt
In heart's-ease and in violet –
In charnel-yard or hidden ocean wave,
Where'er I lie, I shall not scorn my grave.

SONG

LOVE took my life and thrill'd it
Through all its strings,
Play'd round my mind and fill'd it
With sound of wings,

But to my heart he never came
To touch it with his golden flame.

Therefore it is that singing
I do rejoice,

Nor heed the slow years bringing
A harsher voice,

Because the songs which he has sung
Still leave the untouch'd singer young.

But whom in fuller fashion

The Master sways,

For him, swift wing'd with passion, Fleet the brief days.

Betimes the enforced accents come, And leave him ever after dumb.

ON A THRUSH SINGING IN

AUTUMN

SWEET singer of the Spring, when the new world

Was fill'd with song and bloom, and the fresh year

Tripp'd, like a lamb playful and void of fear,

Through daisied grass and young leaves scarce unfurl'd,

Where is thy liquid voice
That all day would rejoice?

Where now thy sweet and homely call, Which from gray dawn to evening's chilling fall

Would echo from thin copse and tassell'd brake,

For homely duty tun'd and love's sweet sake?

Oh, lonely loveless voice, what dost thou here

In the deep silence of the fading year?
Thus do I read answer of thy song:

"I sang when winds blew chilly all day long;

I

sang because hope came and joy was near, I sang a little while, I made good cheer; In summer's cloudless day

My music died away ;

But now the hope and glory of the year
Are dead and gone, a little while I sing
Songs of regret for days no longer here,
And touch'd with presage of the far-off
Spring."

Is this the meaning of thy note, fair bird?
Or do we read into thy simple brain
Echoes of thoughts which human hearts
have stirr'd,

High-soaring joy and melancholy pain?
Nay, nay, that lingering note

Belated from thy throat

66

Regret," is what it sings, "regret, regret ! The dear days pass, but are not wholly

"Now, as I am weary of this vain endeavor
To lift my spirit to eternal sleep;
I seek the marble stairs, the sacred river,
The liquid graves below, where, calm and

deep,

Beneath where that bright, silent water

flows,

Stretch wide the regions of divine repose."

With thoughts like these the Indian suicide Dragg'd forth his stiffen'd limbs from his old lair;

He had no garment on his shrivell'd hide, He shunn'd the grove, and sought the solar glare,

He never look'd aside, and his dead march Had for its goal a gate of one proud arch.

It rose in sculptur'd splendor on the view From the surrounding foliage of dark green,

Whose masses of broad shadow did subdue Its prominent light. The blue sky shone between.

A crowd was on the river's sacred marge, And on the Ganges many a gaudy barge.

Like the yelp of a cur on the air doth float;
And hardly heard is the wild halloo
On the straggling night-breeze borne !

They fly on the blast of the forest That whistles round the wither'd tree, But where they go we may not know, Nor see them as they fly.

With hound and horn they ride away
In the dreary twilight cold and gray,
That hovers near the dying day;

And the peasant hears but cannot see
Those huntsmen pass him by.

Hark! 't is the goblin of the wood,
Rushing down the dark hill-side ;
With steeds that neigh and hounds that
bay,

All viewless sweeps the throng.
And heavily where the fallow-deer feeds
Clatter the hoofs of their hunting steeds,
Like the mountain gale on the valley's
meads;

Till far away the spectres ride,
In distant lands along.

THE SECRET OF THE NIGHT-
INGALE

THE ground I walk'd on felt like air,
Air buoyant with the year's young mirth;
Far, filmy, undulating fair,

The down lay, a long wave of earth;
And a still green foam of woods rose high
Over the hill-line into the sky.

In meadowy pasture browse the kine,
Thin wheat-blades color a brown plough-
line;

Fresh rapture of the year's young joy
Was in the unfolded luminous leaf,
And birds that shower as they toy
Melodious rain that knows not grief,
A song-maze where my heart in bliss
Lay folded, like a chrysalis.