The river's steel-blue crescent curves
To meet, in ebb and flow,
The single broken wharf that serves
For sloop and gundelow.

With salt sea-scents along its shores
The heavy hay-boats crawl,
The long antennæ of their oars
In lazy rise and fall.

Along the gray abutment's wall

The idle shad-net dries;

The toll-man in his cobbler's stall
Sits smoking with closed eyes.

You hear the pier's low undertone

Of waves that chafe and gnaw; You start, a skipper's horn is blown To raise the creaking draw.

At times a blacksmith's anvil sounds
With slow and sluggard beat,
Or stage-coach on its dusty rounds
Wakes up the staring street.

A place for idle eyes and ears,

A cobwebbed nook of dreams;

Left by the stream whose waves are

years

The stranded village seems.

And there, like other moss and rust,
The native dweller clings,
And keeps, in uninquiring trust,
The old, dull round of things.

The fisher drops his patient lines,
The farmer sows his grain,
Content to hear the murmuring pines
Instead of railroad-train.

Go where, along the tangled steep
That slopes against the west,
The hamlet's buried idlers sleep
In still profounder rest.

Throw back the locust's flowery plume,
The birch's pale-green scarf,
And break the web of brier and bloom
From name and epitaph.

A simple muster-roll of death,

Of pomp and romance shorn, The dry, old names that common breath Has cheapened and outworn.

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Yet pause by one low mound, and part
The wild vines o'er it laced,
And read the words by rustic art
Upon its headstone traced.

Haply yon white-haired villager
Of fourscore years can say
What means the noble name of her
Who sleeps with common clay.

An exile from the Gascon land
Found refuge here and rest,
And loved, of all the village band,
Its fairest and its best.

He knelt with her on Sabbath morns, He worshipped through her eyes, And on the pride that doubts and scorns Stole in her faith's surprise.

Her simple daily life he saw

By homeliest duties tried,
In all things by an untaught law
Of fitness justified.

For her his rank aside he laid;
He took the hue and tone
Of lowly life and toil, and made

Her simple ways his own.

Yet still, in gay and careless eaɛe,
To harvest-field or dance
He brought the gentle courtesies,
The nameless grace of France.

And she who taught him love not less
From him she loved in turn
Caught in her sweet unconsciousness
What love is quick to learn.

Each grew to each in pleased accord,
Nor knew the gazing town

If she looked upward to her lord
Or he to her looked down.

How sweet, when summer's day was o'er,

His violin's mirth and wail, The walk on pleasant Newbury's shore, The river's moonlit sail !

Ah! life is brief, though love be long;
The altar and the bier,

The burial hymn and bridal song,
Were both in one short year!

Her rest is quiet on the hill, Beneath the locust's bloom: Far off her lover sleeps as still Within his scutcheoned tomb.

The Gascon lord, the village maid, In death still clasp their hands; The love that levels rank and grade Unites their severed lands.

What matter whose the hillside grave,
Or whose the blazoned stone?
Forever to her western wave
Shall whisper blue Garonne !

O Love!- so hallowing every soil
That gives thy sweet flower room,
Wherever, nursed by ease or toil,

The human heart takes bloom!

Plant of lost Eden, from the sod

Of sinful earth unriven, White blossom of the trees of God Dropped down to us from heaven!

This tangled waste of mound and stone Is holy for thy sake;

A sweetness which is all thy own

Breathes out from fern and brake.

And while ancestral pride shall twine
The Gascon's tomb with flowers,
Fall sweetly here, O song of mine,
With summer's bloom and showers!
And let the lines that severed seem
Unite again in thee,

As western wave and Gallic stream
Are mingled in one sea!

She smiles above her broken chain The languid smile that follows pain, Stretching her cramped limbs to the sun again.

O, joy for all, who hear her call From gray Camaldoli's convent-wall And Elmo's towers to freedom's carnival!

A new life breathes among her vines And olives, like the breath of pines Blown downward from the breezy Apennines.

Lean, O my friend, to meet that breath,

Rejoice as one who witnesseth Beauty from ashes rise, and life from death!

Thy sorrow shall no more be pain, Its tears shall fall in sunlit rain, Writing the grave with flowers: "Arisen again "

THE SUMMONS.

My ear is full of summer sounds,
Of summer sights my languid eye;
Beyond the dusty village bounds
I loiter in my daily rounds,

And in the noon-time shadows lie.

I hear the wild bee wind his horn,
The bird swings on the ripened wheat,
The long green lances of the corn
Are tilting in the winds of morn,

The locust shrills his song of heat.

Another sound my spirit hears,

A deeper sound that drowns them all,

A voice of pleading choked with tears, The call of human hopes and fears,

The Macedonian cry to Paul !

The storm-bell rings, the trumpet blows; I know the word and countersign; Wherever Freedom's vanguard goes, Where stand or fall her friends or foes, I know the place that should be mine.

Shamed be the hands that idly fold,

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