1 Last night I walked to Watertown over the snow with the new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page's evening landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and, as I stood on the hill just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in Sir Launfal was drawn from it. But why do I send you this description like the bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my friends. (LOWELL, to Briggs, in a letter of December, 1848, just after the publication of Sir Launfal. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

Within the hall are song and laughter, The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly,

And sprouting is every corbel and rafter

With lightsome green of ivy and holly; Through the deep gulf of the chimney wide

Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide;
The broad flame-pennons droop and flap
And belly and tug as a flag in the wind;
Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap,
Hunted to death in its galleries blind; 220
And swift little troops of silent sparks,
Now pausing, now scattering away as in
fear,

Go threading the soot-forest's tangled darks

Like herds of startled deer.

Sir Launfal's raiment thin and spare
Was idle mail 'gainst the barbèd air,
For it was just at the Christmas time;
So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime,
And sought for a shelter from cold and

snow

260

In the light and warmth of long-ago;
He sees the snake-like caravan crawl
O'er the edge of the desert, black and
small,

Then nearer and nearer, till, one by one,
He can count the camels in the sun,
As over the red-hot sands they pass
To where, in its slender necklace of grass,
The little spring laughed and leapt in the
shade,

270

And with its own self like an infant played, And waved its signal of palms.

IV

"For Christ's sweet sake, I beg an alms;' The happy camels may reach the spring, But Sir Launfal sees only the grewsome

thing,

The leper, lank as the rain-blanched bone, That cowers beside him, a thing as lone

And white as the ice-isles of Northern

seas

In the desolate horror of his disease.

V

And Sir Launfal said, 'I behold in thee 280 An image of Him who died on the tree; Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns, Thou also hast had the world's buffets and scorns,

And to thy life were not denied

The wounds in the hands and feet and side:
Mild Mary's Son, acknowledge me;
Behold, through him, I give to thee!'

VI

Then the soul of the leper stood up in his eyes

And looked at Sir Launfal, and straight-
way he

Remembered in what a haughtier guise 290
He had flung an alms to leprosie,
When he girt his young life up in gilded
mail

And set forth in search of the Holy Grail.
The heart within him was ashes and dust;
He parted in twain his single crust,
He broke the ice on the streamlet's brink,
And gave the leper to eat and drink,
'Twas a mouldy crust of coarse brown
bread,

'T was water out of a wooden bowl, — Yet with fine wheaten bread was the leper fed,

300

And 't was red wine he drank with his thirsty soul.

The castle gate stands open now,

And the wanderer is welcome to the
hall

As the hangbird is to the elm-tree bough;
No longer scowl the turrets tall,
The Summer's long siege at last is o'er;
When the first poor outcast went in at the
door,

340

She entered with him in disguise,
And mastered the fortress by surprise;
There is no spot she loves so well on
ground,

She lingers and smiles there the whole year round;

The meanest serf on Sir Launfal's land
Has hall and bower at his command;
And there's no poor man in the North
Countree

But is lord of the earldom as much as he.

1848.

1848.

BEAVER BROOK1

HUSHED with broad sunlight lies the hill,
And, minuting the long day's loss,
The cedar's shadow, slow and still,
Creeps o'er its dial of gray moss.

Warm noon brims full the valley's cup,
The aspen's leaves are scarce astir;
Only the little mill sends up

Its busy, never-ceasing burr.

Climbing the loose-piled wall that hems The road along the mill-pond's brink, 10 From 'neath the arching barberry-stems, My footstep scares the shy chewink.

Beneath a bony buttonwood

The mill's red door lets forth the din; The whitened miller, dust-imbued,

Flits past the square of dark within.

No mountain torrent's strength is here;
Sweet Beaver, child of forest still,
Heaps its small pitcher to the ear,

And gently waits the miller's will.

Swift slips Undine along the race

20

1 The little mill stands in a valley between one of the spurs of Wellington Hill and the main summit, just on the edge of Waltham. It is surely one of the loveliest spots in the world. It is one of my lions, and if you will make me a visit this spring I will take you up to hear it roar, and I will show you the oaks' - the largest, I fancy, left in the country. (LOWELL, in a letter of January 5, 1849. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

The poem was originally called 'The Mill.'

THE FIRST SNOW-FALL1
THE snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock

Wore ermine too dear for an earl,

1 See The Changeling' and 'She came and went.' In sending this poem to the Standard Lowell wrote: 'Print that as if you loved it. Let not a comma be blundered. Especially I fear they will put gleaming for gloaming in the first line unless you look to it. May you never have the key which shall unlock the whole meaning of the poem to you!' (Lowell's Letters, Harper and Brothers, ietter of December 22, 1849.)