The miller dreams not at what cost

The quivering millstones hum and whirl,
Nor how for every turn are tost
Armfuls of diamond and of pearl.

But Summer cleared my happier eyes
With drops of some celestial juice,
To see how Beauty underlies,
Forevermore each form of use.

And more; methought I saw that flood,
Which now so dull and darkling steals,
Thick, here and there, with human blood,
To turn the world's laborious wheels.

No more than doth the miller there,
Shut in our several cells, do we
Know with what waste of beauty rare

In that new childhood of the Earth
Life of itself shall dance and play,

45

Fresh blood in Time's shrunk veins make mirth, And labor meet delight half-way.

AL FRESCO

"THE MILL," 1849.

THE dandelions and buttercups
Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee
Stumbles among the clover-tops,
And summer sweetens all but me:
Away, unfruitful lore of books,
For whose vain idiom we reject
The soul's more native dialect,
Aliens among the birds and brooks,
Dull to interpret or conceive

And in the first man's footsteps tread,

Like those who toil through drifted snow!

In some dark corner shall be leant.

The robin sings, as of old, from the limb!
The catbird croons in the lilac bush!

25

15. There is a delightful pair of poems by Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply, and The Tables Turned, which show how another poet treats books and nature.

Through the dim arbor, himself more dim,
Silently hops the hermit-thrush,

The withered leaves keep dumb for him;
The irreverent buccaneering bee

Hath stormed and rifled the nunnery

Of the lily, and scattered the sacred floor
With haste-dropt gold from shrine to door:
There, as of yore,

The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup

Its tiny polished urn holds up,
Filled with ripe summer to the edge,
The sun in his own wine to pledge;
And our tall elm, this hundredth year
Doge of our leafy Venice here,

Who, with an annual ring, doth wed
The blue Adriatic overhead,
Shadows with his palatial mass
The deep canals of flowing grass.

O unestranged birds and bees!
O face of Nature always true!
O never-unsympathizing trees !
O never-rejecting roof of blue,
Whose rash disherison never falls
On us unthinking prodigals,
Yet who convictest all our ill,
So grand and unappeasable !

Methinks my heart from each of these
Plucks part of childhood back again,
Long there imprisoned, as the breeze
Doth every hidden odor seize
Of wood and water, hill and plain;
Once more am I admitted peer

30

35

40

45

50

55

In the upper house of Nature here,
And feel through all my pulses run
The royal blood of breeze and sun.

Upon these elm-arched solitudes
No hum of neighbor toil intrudes;
The only hammer that I hear
Is wielded by the woodpecker,
The single noisy calling his
In all our leaf-hid Sybaris;

The good old time, close-hidden here,

How chanced it that so long I tost
A cable's length from this rich coast,
With foolish anchors hugging close
The beckoning weeds and lazy ooze,
Nor had the wit to wreck before
On this enchanted island's shore,
Whither the current of the sea,
With wiser drift, persuaded me?

80

O, might we but of such rare days Build up the spirit's dwelling-place!

85

A temple of so Parian stone

Would brook a marble god alone,
The statue of a perfect life,

Far-shrined from earth's bestaining strife.
Alas! though such felicity

In our vext world here may not be,
Yet, as sometimes the peasant's hut
Shows stones which old religion cut
With text inspired, or mystic sign
Of the Eternal and Divine,
Torn from the consecration deep

Of some fallen nunnery's mossy sleep,
So, from the ruins of this day
Crumbling in golden dust away,

The soul one gracious block may draw,
Carved with some fragment of the law,
Which, set in life's prosaic wall,
Old benedictions may recall,

And lure some nunlike thoughts to take
Their dwelling here for memory's sake.

105

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE

[When Mr. Lowell wrote this poem he was living at Elmwood in Cambridge, at that time quite remote from town influences, - Cambridge itself being scarcely more than a village, but now rapidly losing its rustic surroundings. The Charles River flowed near by, then a limpid stream, untroubled by factories or sewage. It is a tidal river and not far from Elmwood winds through broad salt marshes. Mr. Longfellow's old home is a short stroll nearer town, and the two poets exchanged pleasant shots, as may be seen by Lowell's To H. W. L., and Longfellow's The Herons of Elmwood. In Under the Willows Mr. Lowell has, as it were, indulged in another reverie at'a later period of his life, among the same familiar surroundings.]