To him that hath not eyes in vain, Our village-microcosm can show.

Come back our ancient walks to tread,

Dear haunts of lost or scattered friends, Old Harvard's scholar-factories red, Where song and smoke and laughter sped The nights to proctor-haunted ends. Constant are all our former loves,

Unchanged the icehouse-girdled pond, Its hemlock glooms, its shadowy coves, Where floats the coot and never moves, Its slope of long-tamed green beyond.

Our old familiars are not laid,

As upon Adam, red like blood, 'Tween him and Eden's happy wood, Glared the commissioned angel's shield.

Or let us seek the seaside, there
To wander idly as we list,
Whether, on rocky headlands bare,
Sharp cedar-horns, like breakers, tear
The trailing fringes of gray mist,

Or whether, under skies full flown,

The brightening surfs, with foamy din, Their breeze-caught forelocks backward blown, Against the beach's yellow zone,

Curl slow, and plunge forever in.

Where, as the cloudbergs eastward blow,
From glow to gloom the hillsides shift
Their plumps of orchard trees arow,
Their lakes of rye that wave and flow,
Their snowy whiteweed's summer drift.

There have we watched the West unfurl
A cloud Byzantium newly born,
With flickering spires and domes of pearl,
And vapory surfs that crowd and curl
Into the sunset's Golden Horn.

There, as the flaming occident

Burned slowly down to ashes gray, Night pitched o'erhead her silent tent, And glimmering gold from Hesper sprent Upon the darkened river lay,

Where a twin sky but just before

Deepened, and double swallows skimmed, And, from a visionary shore, Hung visioned trees, that, more and more, Grew dusk as those above were dimmed.

Then eastward saw we slowly grow
Clear-edged the lines of roof and spire,
While great elm-masses blacken slow,
And linden-ricks their round heads show
Against a flush of widening fire.

Doubtful at first and far away,

The moon-flood creeps more wide and wide; Up a ridged beach of cloudy gray, Curved round the east as round a bay,

It slips and spreads its gradual tide.

Then suddenly, in lurid mood,

The moon looms large o'er town and field,

That lean along the horizon's rim, "Sail on, on," I'll say ; 66 may sunniest hours Convoy you from this land of ours, Since from my side you bear not him!" For years thrice three, wise Horace said, A poem rare let silence bind ; And love may ripen in the shade, Like ours, for nine long seasons laid

In deepest arches of the mind.

Come back! Not ours the Old World's good,
The Old World's ill, thank God, not ours;
But here, far better understood,
The days enforce our native mood,

And challenge all our manlier powers.

Kindlier to me the place of birth

That first my tottering footsteps trod ; There may be fairer spots of earth, But all their glories are not worth The virtue of the native sod.

Thence climbs an influence more benign Through pulse and nerve, through heart and brain;

Sacred to me those fibers fine
That first clasped earth. O, ne'er be mine
The alien sun and alien rain !

These nourish not like homelier glows
Or waterings of familiar skies,
And nature fairer blooms bestows
On the heaped hush of wintry snows,
In pastures dear to childhood's eyes,

Than where Italian earth receives

The partial sunshine's ampler boons,
Where vines carve friezes 'neath the eaves,
And, in dark firmaments of leaves,
The orange lifts its golden moons.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.