Sometimes along the wheel-deep sand
A one-horse wagon slowly crawled,
Deep laden with a youthful band,
Whose look some homestead old
recalled;

Brother perchance, and sisters twain,
And one whose blue eyes told, more
plain

Than the free language of her rosy lip, Of the still dearer claim of love's relationship.

With cheeks of russet-orchard tint,

The light laugh of their native rills, The perfume of their garden's mint,

The breezy freedom of the hills, They bore, in unrestrained delight, The motto of the Garter's knight, Careless as if from every gazing thing Hid by their innocence, as Gyges by his ring.

The clanging sea-fowl came and went, The hunter's gun in the marshes

Loose-haired, barefooted, hand-in

hand,

Young girls went tripping down the sand;

And youths and maidens, sitting in the

moon,

Dreamed o'er the old fond dream from which we wake too soon.

At times their fishing-lines they plied,
With an old Triton at the oar,
Salt as the sea-wind, tough and dried
As a lean cusk from Labrador.
Strange tales he told of wreck and

storm,

Had seen the sea-snake's awful form, And heard the ghosts on Haley's Isle complain,

Speak him off shore, and beg a passage to old Spain !

And there, on breezy morns, they saw

The fishing-schooners outward run, Their low-bent sails in tack and flaw Turned white or dark to shade and

sun.

Sometimes, in calms of closing day, They watched the spectral mirage play,

Saw low, far islands looming tall and nigh,

And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea the sky.

Sometimes a cloud, with thunder black,

Stooped low upon the darkening main,

Piercing the waves along its track

With the slant javelins of rain. And when west wind and sunshine

warm

Chased out to sea its wrecks of storm, They saw the prismy hues in thin. spray showers

Where the green buds of waves burst into white froth flowers.

And when along the line of shore

The mists crept upward chill and damp,

Stretched, careless, on their sandy floor

Beneath the flaring lantern lamp,

They talked of all things old and new, Read, slept, and dreamed as idlers do;

And in the unquestioned freedom of the tent,

Body and o'er-taxed mind to healthful ease unbent.

Once, when the sunset splendors died, And, trampling upthe sloping sand, In lines outreaching far and wide, The white-maned billows swept to land,

Dim seen across the gathering shade, A vast and ghostly cavalcade, They sat around their lighted kerosene, Hearing the deep bass roar their every pause between.

Then, urged thereto, the Editor

Within his full portfolio dipped, Feigning excuse while searching for (With secret pride) his manuscript. Hispale face flushed from eye to beard, With nervous cough his throat he cleared,

And, in a voice so tremulous it betrayed The anxious fondness of an author's heart, he read:

Loud laughed his fellows to see him stand

Whetting his scythe with a listless hand, Hearing a voice in a far-off song, Watching a white hand beckoning long.

"Fie on the witch!" cried a merry girl,

As they rounded the point where Goody Cole

Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl, A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul. "Oho!" she muttered, " ye 're brave to-day!

But I hear the little waves laugh and

THE GRAVE BY THE LAKE.
WHERE the Great Lake's sunny smiles
Dimple round its hundred isles,
And the mountain's granite ledge
Cleaves the water like a wedge,
Ringed about with smooth, gray stones,
Rest the giant's mighty bones.

Close beside, in shade and gleam,
Laughs and ripples Melvin stream;
Melvin water, mountain-born,
All fair flowers its banks adorn;
All the woodland's voices meet,
Mingling with its murmurs sweet.

Over lowlands forest-grown,
Over waters island-strown,
Over silver-sanded beach,
Leaf-locked bay and misty reach,
Melvin stream and burial-heap,
Watch and ward the mountains keep.

Who that Titan cromlech fills?
Forest-kaiser, lord o' the hills?
Knight who on the birchen tree
Carved his savage heraldry?
Priest o' the pine-wood temples dim,
Prophet, sage, or wizard grim?

Rugged type of primal man,
Grim utilitarian,

Loving woods for hunt and prowl,
Lake and hill for fish and fowl,
As the brown bear blind and dull
To the grand and beautiful:

Not for him the lesson drawn
From the mountains smit with dawn.
Star-rise, moon-rise, flowers of May,
Sunset's purple bloom of day, --
Took his life no hue from thence,
Poor amid such affluence?

Haply unto hill and tree
All too near akin was he:
Unto him who stands afar
Nature's marvels greatest are;
Who the mountain purple seeks
Must not climb the higher peaks.

Yet who knows in winter tramp,
Or the midnight of the camp,
What revealings faint and far,
Stealing down from moon and star,
Kindled in that human clod
Thought of destiny and God?

Stateliest forest patriarch,
Grand in robes of skin and bark,
What sepulchral mysteries.
What weird funeral rites, were his?
What sharp wail, what drear lament,
Back scared wolf and eagle sent?

Now, whate'er he may have been,
Low he lies as other men ;
On his mound the partridge drums,
There the noisy blue-jay comes;
Rank nor name nor pomp has he
In the grave's democracy.

Part thy blue lips, Northern lake!
Moss-grown rocks, your silence break!
Tell the tale, theu ancient tree!
Thou, too, slide-worn Ossipee!
Speak, and tell us how and when
Lived and died this king of men !

Wordless moans the ancient pine;
Lake and mountain give no sign;
Vain to trace this ring of stones;
Vain the search of crumbling bones:
Deepest of all mysteries,
And the saddest, silence is.

369

Nameless, noteless, clay with clay
Mingles slowly day by day;
But somewhere, for good or ill,
That dark soul is living still;
Somewhere yet that atom's force
Moves the light-poised universe.
Strange that on his burial-sod
Harebells bloom, and golden-rod,
While the soul's dark horoscope
Holds no starry sign of hope!
Is the Unseen with sight at odds?
Nature's pity more than God's?
Thus I mused by Melvin's side,
While the summer eventide
Made the woods and inland sea
And the mountains mystery;
And the hush of earth and air
Seemed the pause before a prayer, —

Prayer for him, for all who rest,
Mother Earth, upon thy breast,
Lapped on Christian turf, or hid
In rock-cave or pyramid:
All who sleep, as all who live,
Well may need the prayer, "Forgive!"
Desert-smothered caravan,
Knee-deep dust that once was man,
Battle-trenches ghastly piled,
Ocean-floors with white bones tiled,
Crowded tomb and mounded sod,
Dumbly crave that prayer to God.

O the generations old

Over whom no church-bells tolled,
Christless, lifting up blind eyes
To the silence of the skies!
For the innumerable dead
Is my soul disquieted.

Where be now these silent hosts?
Where the camping-ground of ghosts?
Where the spectral conscripts led
To the white tents of the dead?
What strange shore or chartless sea
Holds the awful mystery?

Then the warm sky stooped to make
Double sunset in the lake;
While above I saw with it,

Range on range, the mountains lit;
And the calm and splendor stole
Like an answer to my soul.