Comes that cheerful troubadour,

This mound shall throb his face before,
As when, with inward fires and pain,

It rose a bubble from the plain.
When he cometh, I shall shed,
From this wellspring in my head,
Fountain-drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.
There's fruit upon my barren soil
Costlier far than wine or oil.
There's a berry blue and gold, -
Autumn-ripe, its juices hold
Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart,
Asia's rancor, Athens' art,
Slowsure Britain's secular might,
And the German's inward sight.
I will give my son to eat
Best of Pan's immortal meat,
Bread to eat, and juice to drain ;
So the coinage of his brain

Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars.
He comes, but not of that race bred
Who daily climb my specular head.
Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
Fled the last plumule of the Dark,
Pants up hither the spruce clerk
From South Cove and City Wharf.
I take him up my rugged sides,
Half-repentant, scant of breath,
Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,
And my midsummer snow:
Open the daunting map beneath,

All his county, sea and land,
Dwarfed to measure of his hand;
His day's ride is a furlong space,
His city-tops a glimmering haze.

I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding; "See there the grim gray rounding

Of the bullet of the earth

Whereon ye sail,

Tumbling steep

In the uncontinented deep."

He looks on that, and he turns pale.
"Tis even so, this treacherous kite
Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,
Thoughtless of its anxious freight,
Plunges eyeless on forever;
And he, poor parasite,

Cooped in a ship he cannot steer,
Who is the captain he knows not,
Port or pilot trows not,

Risk or ruin he must share.

I scowl on him with my cloud,

With my north wind chill his blood;
I lame him, clattering down the rocks;
And to live he is in fear.

Then, at last, I let him down
Once more into his dapper town,
To chatter, frightened, to his clan
And forget me if he can.'

As in the old poetic fame

The gods are blind and lame,

And the simular despite

Betrays the more abounding might,

So call not waste that barren cone

Above the floral zone,

Where forests starve:

It is pure use;

What sheaves like those which here we glean

and bind

Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?

Ages are thy days,

Thou grand affirmer of the present tense,

And type of permanence!

Firm ensign of the fatal Being,

Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief, That will not bide the seeing!

Hither we bring

Our insect miseries to thy rocks;
And the whole flight, with folded wing,
Vanish, and end their murmuring,-
Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
Which who can tell what mason laid?
Spoils of a front none need restore,
Replacing frieze and architrave;

Where flowers each stone rosette and metope

brave;

Still is the haughty pile erect

Of the old building Intellect.

Complement of human kind,
Holding us at vantage still,
Our sumptuous indigence,

O barren mound, thy plenties fill!
We fool and prate;

Thou art silent and sedate.
To myriad kinds and times one sense
The constant mountain doth dispense;
Shedding on all its snows and leaves,
One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.
Thou seest, O watchman tall,
Our towns and races grow and fall,
And imagest the stable good
For which we all our lifetime grope,
In shifting form the formless mind,
And though the substance us elude,
We in thee the shadow find.

Thou, in our astronomy

An opaker star,

Seen haply from afar,

Above the horizon's hoop,

A moment, by the railway troop,

As o'er some bolder height they speed,

By circumspect ambition,

By errant gain,

By feasters and the frivolous, —

Recallest us,

And makest sane.

Mute orator! well skilled to plead,

And send conviction without phrase,
Thou dost succor and remede

The shortness of our days,

And promise, on thy Founder's truth,
Long morrow to this mortal youth.

FABLE.

THE mountain and the squirrel

Had a quarrel,

And the former called the latter 'Little Prig;'

Bun replied,

'You are doubtless very big;

But all sorts of things and weather

Must be taken in together,

To make up a year

And a sphere.

And I think it no disgrace

To occupy my place.

If I'm not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry.

I'll not deny you make

A very pretty squirrel track;

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;

If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.'

ODE.

INSCRIBED TO W. H. CHANNING.

THOUGH loath to grieve

The evil time's sole patriot,

I cannot leave

My honied thought

For the priest's cant,

Or statesman's rant.