232 



ARBOR DA Y MANUAL. 



AL FRESCO. 



THE dandelions and buttercups 

 Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee 

 Stumbles among the clover tops, 

 And summer sweetens all but me: 

 Away, unfruitful lore of books, 

 For whose vain idiom we reject 

 The soul's more native dialect, 

 Aliens among the birds and brooks, 

 Dull to interpret or conceive 

 What gospels lost the woods retrieve ! 

 Away, ye critics, city-bred, 

 Who set man-traps of thus and so, 

 And in the first man's footsteps tread, 

 Like those who toil through drifted snow ! 

 Away, my poets, whose sweet spell 

 Can make a garden of a cell 

 I need ye not, for I to-day 

 Will make one long sweet verse of play. 



Snap, chord of manhood's tenser strain 1 

 To-day I will be a boy again; 

 The mind's pursuing element, 

 Like a bow slackened and unbent, 

 In some dark corner shall be leant. 

 The robin sings, as of old, from the limb ! 

 The cat-bird croons in the lilac bush 

 Through the dim arbor, himself more dim, 

 Silently hops the hermit-thrush, 

 The withered leaves keep dumb for him; 

 The irreverent buccaneering bee 

 Hath- stormed and rifled the nunnery 

 Of the lily, and scattered the sacred floor 

 With haste-dropt gold from shrine to door; 

 There, as of yore, 

 The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup 

 Its tiny polished urn holds up, 

 Filled with ripe summer to the edge, 

 The sun in his own wine to pledge; 

 And our tall elm, this hundredth year 

 Doge of our leafy Venice here, 



Who, with an annual ring, doth wed 

 The blue Adriatic overhead, 

 Shadows with his palatial mass 

 The deep canals of flowing grass. 



O unestranged birds and bees ! 

 O face of nature always true ! 

 O never-unsympathizing trees ! 



never-rejecting roof of blue, 

 Whose rash disherison never falls 

 On us unthinking prodigals, 



Yet who convictest all our ills, 

 So grand and unappeasable ! 

 Methinks my heart from each of these 

 Plucks part of childhood back again, 

 Long there imprisoned, as the breeze 

 Doth every hidden odor seize 

 Of wood and water, hill and plain; 

 Once more am I admitted peer 

 In the upper house of nature here, 

 And feel through all my pulses run 

 The royal blood of breeze and sun. 



Upon these elm-arched solitudes 

 No hum of neighbor toil intrudes; 

 The only hammer that I hear 

 Is wielded by the woodpecker. 

 The single noisy calling his 

 In all our leaf-hid Sybaris; 

 The good old time, close-hidden here, 

 Persists, a loyal cavalier, 

 While Roundheads prim, with point of fox, 

 Probe wainscot-chink and empty box; 

 Here no hoarse-voice iconoclast 

 Insults thy statues, royal Past; 

 Myself too prone the axe to wield, 



1 touch the silver side of the shield 

 With lance reversed, and challenge peace, 

 A willing convert of the trees. 



***** 



LOWELL. 



The earth 



Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill; 

 Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs 

 Whispered it to the woods. 



MILTON'S Paradise Lost. 



