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Like a mermaid's green eyelash, and then anon
A stem that a tower might rest upon,
Standing spear-straight in the waist-deep moss,
Its bony roots clutching around and across,

As if they would tear up earth's heart in their
grasp
Ere the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp;
Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine,

To shrunk snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine,
Till they straightened and let their stayes fall to the floor,
Hearing waves moan again on the perilous shore

Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow groped its way "Twixt the frothy gnashed tusks of some ship-crunching bay.

So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall,
As the Gypsy child grows that eats crusts in the hall;
It sucked the whole strength of the earth and the sky,
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, all brought it supply,
'T was a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there,
A true part of the landscape as sea, land, and air;
For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was

To force up these wild births of the woods under glass,

And So, if 't is told as it should be told,

Though 't were sung under Venice's moonlight of

gold,

You would hear the old voice of its mother, the pine, Murmur sealike and Northern through every line, And the verses should hang, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody,

Like the lithe sun-steeped limbs of the parent tree.

Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food For their grim roots is left when the thousand-yeared wood

The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring

Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing

From Michael's white shoulder- is hewn and defaced

By iconoclast axes in desperate waste,

And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long,
Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song

Then the legends go with them, even yet on the sea

A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree,

And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the core

With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.

Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never let in,
Since the day of creation, the light and the din
Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed

From the midnight primeval its armful of shade,
And has kept the weird Past with its sagas alive
Within sound of the hum of To-day's busy hive,
There the legend takes root in the age-gathered gloom,
And its murmurous boughs for their tossing find room.

Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goes
Groping down to the sea 'neath his mountainous snows;
Where the lake's frore Sahara of never-tracked white,
When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night
With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost,
As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost ;
Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires which throw
Their own threatening shadows far round o'er the snow,
When the wolf howls aloof, and the wavering glare
Flashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear,
When the wood's huge recesses, half-lighted, supply
A canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try,

Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not down

Through the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town,

But skulk in the depths of the measureless wood 'Mid the Dark's creeping whispers that curdle the blood, When the eye, glanced in dread o'er the shoulder, may dream,

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Ere it shrinks to the camp-fire's companioning gleam,
That it saw the fierce ghost of the Red Man crouch back
To the shroud of the tree-trunk's invincible black;
There the old shapes crowd thick round the pine-
shadowed camp,

Which shun the keen gleam of the scholarly lamp,
And the seed of the legend finds true Norland ground,
While the border-tale 's told and the canteen flits round.

A CONTRAST.

THY love thou sentest oft to me,

And still as oft I thrust it back;

Thy messengers I could not see

In those who every thing did lack,
The poor, the outcast, and the black.

Pride held his hand before mine eyes,

The world with flattery stuffed mine ears;

I looked to see a monarch's guise,

Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years, Poor, naked, fettered, full of tears.

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