Curl slow, and plunge forever in.

Where, as the cloudbergs eastward blow, | Against the beach's yellow zone,
From glow to gloom the hillsides shift
Their plumps of orchard-trees arow,
Their lakes of rye that wave and flow,
Their snowy whiteweed's summer drift.

There have we watched the West unfurl
A cloud Byzantium newly born,
With flickering spires and domes of
pearl,

And vapory surfs that crowd and curl
Into the sunset's Golden Horn.

Doubtful at first and far away,
The moon-flood creeps more wide and
wide;

Up a ridged beach of cloudy gray,
Curved round the east as round a bay,
It slips and spreads its gradual tide.

Then suddenly, in lurid mood,

And, as we watch those canvas towers
That lean along the horizon's rim,
"Sail on," I'll say; "may sunniest
hours

Convoy you from this land of ours,
Since from my side you bear not him!"

For years thrice three, wise Horace said,
A poem rare let silence bind;
And love may ripen in the shade,
Like ours, for nine long seasons laid
In deepest arches of the mind.

Come back! Not ours the Old World's
good,

The Old World's ill, thank God, not

ours;

But her, far better understood,
The days enforce our native mod,
And challenge all our manlier powers.
Kindlier to me the place of birth
That first my tottering footsteps trod;
There may be fairer spots of earth,
But all their glories are not worth
The virtue of the native sod.

Thence climbs an influence more benign
Through pulse and nerve, through heart
and brain;

Sacred to me those fibres fine

That first clasped earth. O, ne'er be mine

The alien sun and alien rain!

These nourish not like homelier glows
Or waterings of familiar skies,
And nature fairer blooms bestows
On the heaped hush of wintry snows,

The moon looms large o'er town and In pastures dear to childhood's eyes,

Crushing and crowding, wading and Stand there alone for a little while,

And with gentle approaches it grows sublime,

Where you can hear them snort and Dilating slowly as you win

A sense from the silence to take it in.

So wide the loneness, so lucid the air, The granite beneath you so savagely bare,

You well might think you were looking down

From some sky-silenced mountain's

crown,

Whose far-down pines are wont to tear
Locks of wool from the topmost cloud.
Only be sure you go alone,

For Grandeur is inaccessibly proud,
And never yet has backward thrown
Her veil to feed the stare of a crowd;
To more than one was never shown
That awful front, nor is it fit

O'er which, through color's dreamiest
grades,

The yellow sunbeams pause and creep!
Now pink it blooms, now glimmers gray,
Now shadows to a filmy blue,
Tries one, tries all, and will not stay,
But flits from opal hue to hue,
And runs through every tenderest range
Of change that seems not to be change,
So rare the sweep, so nice the art,
That lays no stress on any part,
But shifts and lingers and persuades;
So soft that sun-brush in the west,
That asks no costlier pigments' aids,
But mingling knobs, flaws, angles, dints,

That she, Cothurnus-shod, stand bowed Indifferent of worst or best,

Until the self-approving pit
Enjoy the gust of its own wit

In babbling plaudits cheaply loud;
She hides her mountains and her sea
From the harriers of scenery,

Who hunt down sunsets, and huddle
and bay,

Mouthing and mumbling the dying day.

Trust me, 't is something to be cast
Face to face with one's Self at last,
To be taken out of the fuss and strife,
The endless clatter of plate and knife,
The bore of books and the bores of the
street,

From the singular mess we agree to call
Life,

Where that is best which the most fools
vote is,

And to be set down on one's own two
feet

So nigh to the great warm heart of God,
You almost seem to feel it beat
Down from the sunshine and up from
the sod;

To be compelled, as it were, to notice
All the beautiful changes and chances
Through which the landscape flits and
glances,

And to see how the face of common day
Is written all over with tender histories,
When you study it that intenser way
In which a lover looks at his mistress.

Till now you dreamed not what could
be done

With a bit of rock and a ray of sun;
But look, how fade the lights and shades
Of keen bare edge and crevice deep!
How doubtfully it fades and fades,
And glows again, yon craggy steep,

Enchants the cliffs with wraiths and

hints

And gracious preludings of tints,
Where all seems fixed, yet all evades,
And indefinably pervades
Perpetual movement with perpetual rest!

III.

Away northeast is Boone Island light;
You might mistake it for a ship,
Only it stands too plumb upright,
And like the others does not slip
Behind the sea's unsteady brink;
Though, if a cloud-shade chance to dip
Upon it a moment, 't will suddenly sink,
Levelled and lost in the darkened main,
Till the sun builds it suddenly up again,
As if with a rub of Aladdin's lamp.
On the mainland you see a misty camp
Of mountains pitched tumultuously:
That one looming so long and large
Is Saddleback, and that point you see
Over yon low and rounded marge,
Like the boss of a sleeping giant's targe
Laid over his breast, is Ossipee;
That shadow there may be Kearsarge;
That must be Great Haystack; I love
these names,

Wherewith the lonely farmer tames
Nature to mute companionship
With his own mind's domestic mood,
And strives the surly world to clip
In the arms of familiar habitude.
'T is well he could not contrive to make
A Saxon of Agamenticus:
He glowers there to the north of us,
Wrapt in his blanket of blue haze,
Unconvertibly savage, and scorns to
take

The white man's baptism or his ways.