With now and then a ruder shock,
Which made our very bedsteads rock.
We heard the loosened clapboards tost,
The board-nails snapping in the frost;
620 And on us, through the unplastered wall,
Felt the light sifted snow-flakes fall.
But sleep stole on, as sleep will do
When hearts are light and life is new;
Faint and more faint the murmurs grew,
625 Till in the summer-land of dreams

They softened to the sound of streams,
Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars,
And lapsing waves on quiet shores.

Next morn we wakened with the shout

630 Of merry voices high and clear;

And saw the teamsters drawing near
To break the drifted highways out.
Down the long hillside treading slow
We saw the half-buried oxen go,

635 Shaking the snow from heads uptost,

640

645

Their straining nostrils white with frost.
Before our door the straggling train
Drew up, an added team to gain.
The elders threshed their hands a-cold,
Passed, with the cider-mug, their jokes
From lip to lip; the younger folks

Down the loose snow-banks, wrestling, rolled,
Then toiled again the cavalcade

O'er windy hill, through clogged ravine,
And woodland paths that wound between
Low drooping pine-boughs winter-weighed.
From every barn a team afoot,

At every house a new recruit,

Where, drawn by Nature's subtlest law,

650 Haply the watchful young men saw
Sweet doorway pictures of the curls
And curious eyes of merry girls,
Lifting their hands in mock defence
Against the snow-ball's compliments,
655 And reading in each missive tost
The charm with Eden never lost.

We heard once more the sleigh-bells' sound;
And, following where the teamsters led,
The wise old Doctor went his round,

660 Just pausing at our door to say,
In the brief autocratic way

Of one who, prompt at Duty's call,
Was free to urge her claim on all,

That some poor neighbor sick abed
665 At night our mother's aid would need.
For, one in generous thought and deed,
What mattered in the sufferer's sight
The Quaker matron's inward light,
The Doctor's mail of Calvin's creed?
670 All hearts confess the saints elect
Who, twain in faith, in love agree,
And melt not in an acid sect

The Christian pearl of charity!

So days went on: a week had passed 675 Since the great world was heard from last. The Almanac we studied o'er,

Read and reread our little store

Of books and pamphlets, scarce a score;
One harmless novel, mostly hid

680 From younger eyes, a book forbid,

659. The wise old Doctor was Dr. Weld of Haverhill, an able man, who died at the age of ninety-six.

685

And poetry, (or good or bad,

A single book was all we had,)

Where Ellwood's meek, drab-skirted Muse,
A stranger to the heathen Nine,

Sang, with a somewhat nasal whine,
The wars of David and the Jews.
At last the floundering carrier bore
The village paper to our door.
Lo! broadening outward as we read,
690 To warmer zones the horizon spread;
In panoramic length unrolled
We saw the marvels that it told.
Before us passed the painted Creeks,
And daft McGregor on his raids
In Costa Rica's everglades.
And up Taygetus winding slow
Rode Ypsilanti's Mainote Greeks,
A Turk's head at each saddle-bow!
Welcome to us its week-old news,

695

700 Its corner for the rustic Muse,

683. Thomas Ellwood, one of the Society of Friends, a contemporary and friend of Milton, and the suggestor of Paradise Regained, wrote an epic poem in five books, called Davideis, the life of King David of Israel. He wrote the book, we are told, for his own diversion, so it was not necessary that others should be diverted by it. Ellwood's autobiography, a quaint and delightful book, has recently been issued in Howells's series of Choice Autobiography.

693. Referring to the removal of the Creek Indians from Georgia to beyond the Mississippi.

694. In 1822 Sir Gregor McGregor, a Scotchman, began an ineffectual attempt to establish a colony in Costa Rica.

697. Taygetus is a mountain on the Gulf of Messenia in Greece, and near by is the district of Maina, noted for its robbers and pirates. It was from these mountaineers that Ypsiianti, a Greek patriot, drew his cavalry in the struggle with Turkey, which resulted in the independence of Greece.

Its monthly gauge of snow and rain,
Its record, mingling in a breath

The wedding knell and dirge of death;
Jest, anecdote, and love-lorn tale,

705 The latest culprit sent to jail;

Its hue and cry of stolen and lost,
Its vendue sales and goods at cost,
And traffic calling loud for gain.
We felt the stir of hall and street,
710 The pulse of life that round us beat;
The chill embargo of the snow

Was melted in the genial glow;

Wide swung again our ice-locked door,
And all the world was ours once more!

715 Clasp, Angel of the backward look
And folded wings of ashen gray
And voice of echoes far away,
The brazen covers of thy book;
The weird palimpsest old and vast,
720 Wherein thou hid'st the spectral past;
Where, closely mingling, pale and glow
The characters of joy and woe;
The monographs of outlived years,
Or smile-illumed or dim with tears,

725

730

Green hills of life that slope to death, And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees Shade off to mournful cypresses

With the white amaranths underneath. Even while I look, I can but heed

The restless sands' incessant fall, Importunate hours that hours succeed, Each clamorous with its own sharp need, And duty keeping pace with all.

Shut down and clasp the heavy lids; 735 I hear again the voice that bids

The dreamer leave his dream midway
For larger hopes and graver fears:
Life greatens in these later years,
The century's aloe flowers to-day!

740 Yet, haply, in some lull of life,

Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
The wordling's eyes shall gather dew,
Dreaming in throngful city ways
Of winter joys his boyhood knew;
745 And dear and early friends- the few
Who yet remain shall pause to view
These Flemish pictures of old days;
Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
And stretch the hands of memory forth
To warm them at the wood-fire's blaze!
And thanks untraced to lips unknown
Shall greet me like the odors blown
From unseen meadows newly mown,
Or lilies floating in some pond,

750

755 Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond;
The traveller owns the grateful sense

Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air.

741. The name is drawn from a historic compact in 1040. when the Church forbade the barons to make any attack on each other between sunset on Wednesday and sunrise on the following Monday, or upon any ecclesiastical fast or feast day. It also provided that no man was to molest a laborer working in the fields, or to lay hands on any implement of husbandry, on pain of excommunication.

747. The Flemish school of painting was chiefly occupied with homely interiors.