The collected poems of William Ellery Channing the younger, 1817-1901

She woos me on, never may I retreat;
Cold woods, bare fields, and you, ye winter skies,
In you my thoughts, responsive feelings meet,
Within your forms I look, and with your eyes.

And man! that curious copy of myself,
I still pursue, as tired dogs hunt the deer,—
That silent mouthpiece, that sly, subtle elf.
I oft shall seek, and rarely find, with fear!

Where roves the Nymph who smoothed the fountain's crest,
And the cold Dryad of the hazel's dell,—
Egeria's couch, where sparely she could rest,
Of its dry ferns, the gleaming icicle?

Some sprouting youth, some knowing miss instead,
The painted moral of a grandam's eye,
Or cold-complexioned adults with small head,
The sticks which our Dodonas now supply.

944

Nature! I come, fed with thy homely cheer,
Nature! I kneel, part hopeful at thy shrine,
Form of the Solitude, decline the ear,
And if considerate, then, confess me, thine!

Court the sleek herd! and hopelessly be drawn,
Into that false and slimy serpent's lair;
I long must love in mossy groves, the fawn,
And in the blue lake, bathe, my late despair.

And when the emerald pine-woods' murmuring shell
Reflects the cadence of the much-voiced sea,
As there some mournful air rings his small knell,
Or the cold sunset fades, there let me be;

Then as the dying day his saffron plume
Wafts o'er the purple of these Indian hills,
Dreaming, I mark red warriors leave their tombs,
I see their tawny columns bridge the rills.

Weird bends their tragic dance across yon mead,
Dashed on day's fleeting light gleams lance and bow,
And the young lover lifts his mystic reed
To a dark eye of sloe-like glimmering hue.

945

Then, as the day-god dies beneath the lake,
The ruby glasses of the copsewood oak
Their last Madeira promise ripely shake,
That evermore in midnight's frost is broke.

Soft thro' the east, her silver pomp I see,
The mistress of the lone romantic night,
O'er sleeping hill, bare stone and leafless tree,
She pours her careless world of dewy light.

Then, in that roof, a million lamps of spar,
Set in the brow of heaven's high azure screen,
Gleam slowly down, while some revolving star
My bark guides radiant o'er the mystic green,—

Of a serener land, than space or time,
Carve for the cold and worldly breasted man;
Compel me not to fly the foolish rhyme,
Nor to desert poor nature's secret plan.

I know that charming glows both camp and hall,
Where beauty's eye outshines its daily fire,
Too true, the poet cannot hope for all,—
Be his to creep in dust, and yet aspire;

946

For in the heart of these neglected things,
The thin, deserted field, and wood-road wild,
A virtue breathes, a cheerful patience sings,
Mother! thou never couldst forget thy child.

University of Virginia Library

THE SHOWS OF NATURE.