To be the guest of haystack or of hedge, Nobly superior to the household gear That forfeits us our privilege of nature. I bait him with my match-box and my pouch,

Nor grudge the uncostly sympathy of smoke,

His equal now, divinely unemployed. Some smack of Robin Hood is in the

eyes,

Climb high to swing and shout on peril. ous boughs,

Or, from the willow's armory equipped With musket dumb, green banner, edgeless sword,

Make good the rampart of their treeredoubt

'Gainst eager British storming from below,

And keep alive the tale of Bunker's Hill.

Here, too, the men that mend our village ways,

Vexing McAdam's ghost with pounded slate,

Their nooning take; much noisy talk they spend

On horses and their ills; and, as John Bull

Tells of Lord This or That, who was his friend,

So these make boast of intimacies long With famous teams, and add large estimates,

By competition swelled from mouth to mouth,

Of how much they could draw, till one, ill pleased

To have his legend overbid, retorts: "You take and stretch truck-horses in a string

From here to Long Wharf end, one thing I know,

Not heavy neither, they could never draw,

Ensign's long bow!" Then laughter loud and long.

So they in their leaf-shadowed micro

cosm

Image the larger world; for wheresoe'er Ten men are gathered, the observant eye Will find mankind in little, as the stars Glide up and set, and all the heavens revolve

In the small welkin of a drop of dew.

I will be grateful while I live, nor question

The wisdom that hath made us what we are,

With such large range as from the alehouse bench

Can reach the stars and be with both at home.

They tell us we have fallen on prosy days,

Condemned to glean the leavings of earth's feast

Where gods and heroes took delight of old;

But though our lives, moving in one dull round

Of repetition infinite, become Stale as a newspaper once read, and though

History herself, seen in her workshop,

seem

To have lost the art that dyed those glorious panes,

Rich with memorial shapes of saint and

sage,

That pave with splendor the Past's dusky aisles,

Panes that enchant the light of common day

With colors costly as the blood of kings,

Till with ideal hues it edge our thought,

Yet while the world is left, while nature lasts,

And man the best of nature, there shall be

Somewhere contentment for these human hearts,

Some freshness, some unused material For wonder and for song. I lose myself In other ways where solemn guide-posts

say,

This way to Knowledge, This way to Repose,

But here, here only, I am ne'er betrayed,

For every by-path leads me to my love.

God's passionless reformers, influences, That purify and heal and are not seen, Shall man say whence your virtue is, or how

Ye make medicinal the wayside weed?

So mused I once within my willow-tent One brave June morning, when the bluff northwest,

Thrusting aside a dank and snuffling day

That made us bitter at our neighbors' sins,

bridge

Thundered, and then was silent; on the roofs

The sun-warped shingles rippled with the heat;

Summer on field and hill, in heart and brain,

All life washed clean in this high tide of June.

DARA.

WHEN Persia's sceptre trembled in a hand

Wilted with harem-heats, and all the land

Was hovered over by those vulture ills That snuff decaying empire from afar, Then, with a nature balanced as a star, Dara arose, a shepherd of the hills.

He who had governed fleecy subjects well

Made his own village by the selfsame spell

Secure and quiet as a guarded fold; Then, gathering strength by slow and wise degrees

Under his sway, to neighbor villages Order returned, and faith and justice old.

sparkling cheer

And roared a lusty stave; the sliding Charles,

Blue toward the west, and bluer and

more blue,

Living and lustrous as a woman's eyes

wise

Endued the realm with brain and hands and eyes,

He sought on every side men brave and just;

And having heard our mountain shepherd's praise,

ward curve

hair