1839.

Ever the fiery Pentecost

Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs,

And through the priest the mind inspires.

The word unto the prophet spoken

Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind:
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.

I know what say the fathers wise;
The Book itself before me lies:
Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,
And he who blent both in his line,
The younger Golden Lips or mines,
Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines;
His words are music in my ear,
I see his cowled portrait dear,
And yet, for all his faith could see,
I would not the good bishop be.

FROM

WOOD-NOTES

I

For this present, hard
Is the fortune of the bard

Born out of time;

1840.

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All his accomplishment

From Nature's utmost treasure spent
Booteth not him.

When the pine tosses its cones

To the song of its waterfall tones,

He speeds to the woodland walks,

To birds and trees he talks;
Cæsar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home.
He goes to the river-side-
Not hook nor line hath he;

He stands in the meadows wide
Nor gun nor scythe to see;
With none has he to do,
And none seek him,

Nor men below,

Nor spirits dim.

Sure some god his eye enchants:
What he knows nobody wants.
In the wood he travels glad
Without better fortune had,
Melancholy without bad.
Planter of celestial plants,

What he knows nobody wants;

What he knows he hides, not vaunts.

Knowledge this man prizes best

Seems fantastic to the rest:

Pondering shadows, colors, clouds,
Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds,
Boughs on which the wild bees settle,
Tints that spot the violet's petal,
Why Nature loves the number five,
And why the star-form she repeats.
Lover of all things alive,

Wonderer at all he meets,

Wonderer chiefly at himself,

Who can tell him what he is,

Or how meet in human elf
Coming and past eternities?

And such I knew, a forest seer,

A minstrel of the natural year,

Foreteller of the vernal ides,
Wise harbinger of spheres and tides,
A lover true who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart.
It seemed that Nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
In quaking bog, on snowy hill,
Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
Under the snow, between the rocks,
In damp fields known to bird and fox,
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin bower,
As if a sunbeam showed the place,
And tell its long-descended race.

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50

55

70

He found the tawny thrush's broods,
And the shy hawk did wait for him.

What others did at distance hear,

And guessed within the thicket's gloom,

Was showed to this philosopher,

And at his bidding seemed to come.

In unploughed Maine, he sought the lumberers' gang, 75 Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;

He trode the unplanted forest-floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone,

Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,

And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
He saw, beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,

80

The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born heads,

And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,

Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers. He heard, when in the grove, at intervals,

85

With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls

One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green century;

Low lies the plant to whose creation went
Sweet influence from every element,

90

Whose living towers the years conspired to build,
Whose giddy top the morning loved to gild.

Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,

He roamed, content alike with man and beast.
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
Three moons his great heart him a hermit made,
So long he roved at will the boundless shade.
The timid it concerns to ask their way,

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And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray,
To make no step until the event is known,

100

And ills to come as evils past bemoan.
Not so the wise: no coward watch he keeps
To spy what danger on his pathway creeps;
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there 's his road,
By God's own light illumined and foreshowed.
'T was one of the charmed days
When the genius of God doth flow:
The wind may alter twenty ways,

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To hill and cloud his face was known,
It seemed the likeness of their own;
They knew by secret sympathy
The public child of earth and sky.
"You ask," he said, "what guide,

Me through trackless thickets led,

Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide?

I found the water's bed:

The watercourses were my guide;

I travelled grateful by their side,

Or through their channel dry;

They. led me through the thicket damp,

Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp,

Through beds of granite cut my road,

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