Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood

rusted key.

December, 1844.

90

THE FATHERLAND.

I.

WHERE is the true man's fatherland?
Is it where he by chance is born?
Doth not the yearning spirit scorn
In such scant borders to be spanned?
O yes! his fatherland must be
As the blue heaven wide and free!

II.

Is it alone where freedom is,

Where God is God and man is man?
Doth he not claim a broader span
For the soul's love of home than this?

O yes! his fatherland must be

As the blue heaven wide and free!

III.

Where'er a human heart doth wear

Joy's myrtle-wreath or sorrow's gyves,

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Where'er a human spirit strives
After a life more true and fair,
There is the true man's birthplace grand,
His is a world-wide fatherland!

IV.

Where'er a single slave doth pine,
Where'er one man may help another,
Thank God for such a birthright, brother,
That spot of earth is thine and mine!
There is the true man's birthplace grand,
His is a world-wide fatherland

20

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE.

I.

WHAT Visionary tints the year puts on,
When falling leaves falter through motionless air
Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,
As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills

The bowl between me and those distant hills,
And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

II.

No more the landscape holds its wealth apart, Making me poorer in my poverty,

But mingles with my senses and my heart;

My own projected spirit seems to me

In her own reverie the world to steep;

"Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep, Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree.

III.

How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,
Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms,
Each into each, the hazy distances!
The softened season all the landscape charms;
Those hills, my native village that embay,
In waves of dreamier purple roll away,

And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

20

IV.

Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee
Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves;
The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory
Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves
Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye
Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by,

So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.

V.

The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates,

Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne, Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits;

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Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails;
Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails,

With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.

VI.

The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer;

The chipmunk, on the shingly shagbark's bough, Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound 40 Whisks to his winding fastness underground;

The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmos

phere.

VII.

O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;

The single crow a single caw lets fall;

And all around me every bush and tree

Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will be, Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

VIII.

The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees,
Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,
And hints at her foregone gentilities

50

With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.

IX.

He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, Who, mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt, With distant eye broods over other sights, Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace, The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace, And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

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X.

The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost, And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, After the first betrayal of the frost,

Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky;

The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold,

To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring

eye.

70

ΧΙ.

The ash her purple drops forgivingly

And sadly, breaking not the general hush;
The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea,