THe Mature-Student 
* Dead! Ah, no! the white fields sleep, 
The frozen rivers flow; 
And summer’s myriad seed-hearts beat 
Within this breast of snow. 
With spring’s first green the holly glows 
And flame of autumn late, — 
The embers of the summer warm 
In winter’s roaring grate. 
The thrush’s song is silent now, 
The rill no longer sings, 
But loud and long the strong winds strike 
Ten million singing strings. 
O’er mountains high, o’er prairies far, 
Hark! the wild pzan’s roll! 
The lyre is strung ’twixt ocean shores 
And swept from pole to pole! 
My meeting with that frog in the dead of winter 
was no trifling experience, nor one that the biologist 
ought to fail to understand. Had I been a poet, that 
meeting would have been of consequence to all the 
world; as I was, however, it meant something only 
to me,—a new point of view, an inspiration, —a 
beautiful poem that I cannot write. 
This attitude of the nature-lover, because it is 
contemplative and poetical, is not therefore mystical 
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