34 LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



Were choked with leaves, and on their ragged biers 

 Lay dead the sweets of summer — damask rose, 

 Clove pink, old-fashioned, loved New England flowers. 

 Only keen, salt-sea odors filled the air. 

 Sea-sounds, sea-odors — these were all my world. 

 Hence it is that life languishes with me inland." 



Infinite variance of changing moods has the 

 hill which lifts such abrupt crags above the Ponka- 

 poag plain. At times the poet may have seen it as 

 it was one day not long ago, when a great thunder- 

 storm, born of the sweltering, blue haze of a 

 fiercely hot July day, swept across it. On that day 

 the hill withdrew itself into the menacing black 

 sky, looming against it, then vanishing, becoming 

 part of a night like that of the apocalypse, in which 

 hung the observatory and the higher houses of 

 Ponkapoag hill " as glaring as our sins on judg- 

 ment day." The storm in which the miracle of 

 "The Legend of Ara-Cceli " was wrought could not 

 have been blacker than the sky, nor the face of the 

 monk, when he saw the toes of the bambino be- 

 neath the door, whiter than gleamed those houses. 

 The weirder, greater things of nature loom often 

 through the poems of the man who looked upon 

 such scenes from the study window in what was 



