May-Day | Page 5

upbraid,

Or taunt us with our hope
decayed?
Or who like thee persuade,
Making the splendour of the air,
The morn and
sparkling dew, a snare?
Or who resent
Thy genius, wiles, and blandishment?
There is no orator prevails
To beckon or persuade
Like thee the youth or maid:
Thy
birds, thy songs, thy brooks, thy gales,
Thy blooms, thy kinds,
Thy echoes in the
wilderness,
Soothe pain, and age, and love's distress,
Fire fainting will, and build
heroic minds.
For thou, O Spring! canst renovate
All that high God did first create.
Be still his arm
and architect,
Rebuild the ruin, mend defect;
Chemist to vamp old worlds with new,

Coat sea and sky with heavenlier blue,
New-tint the plumage of the birds,
And
slough decay from grazing herds,
Sweep ruins from the scarped mountain,
Cleanse
the torrent at the fountain,
Purge alpine air by towns defiled,
Bring to fair mother
fairer child,
Not less renew the heart and brain,
Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,

Make the aged eye sun-clear,
To parting soul bring grandeur near.
Under gentle types,
my Spring
Masks the might of Nature's king,
An energy that searches thorough

From Chaos to the dawning morrow;
Into all our human plight,
The soul's pilgrimage
and flight;
In city or in solitude,
Step by step, lifts bad to good,
Without halting,
without rest,
Lifting Better up to Best;
Planting seeds of knowledge pure,
Through
earth to ripen, through heaven endure.
THE ADIRONDACS.

A JOURNAL.
DEDICATED TO MY FELLOW-TRAVELLERS IN AUGUST, 1858.
Wise and polite,--and if I drew
Their several portraits, you would own
Chaucer had
no such worthy crew,
Nor Boccace in Decameron.
We crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends,
Thence, in strong country carts,
rode up the forks
Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach
The Adirondac lakes. At
Martin's Beach
We chose our boats; each man a boat and guide,--
Ten men, ten
guides, our company all told.
Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,
With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,

Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,
Tahawus, Seaward, MacIntyre,
Baldhead,
And other Titans without muse or name.
Pleased with these grand
companions, we glide on,
Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills,
And
made our distance wider, boat from boat,
As each would hear the oracle alone.
By the
bright morn the gay flotilla slid
Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,

Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,
Through scented banks of lilies
white and gold,
Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,
On through the Upper
Saranac, and up
Pere Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass
Winding through
grassy shallows in and out,
Two creeping miles of rushes, pads, and sponge,
To
Follansbee Water, and the Lake of Loons.
Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,
Under low mountains, whose unbroken
ridge
Ponderous with beechen forest sloped the shore.
A pause and council: then,
where near the head
On the east a bay makes inward to the land
Between two rocky
arms, we climb the bank,
And in the twilight of the forest noon
Wield the first axe
these echoes ever heard.
We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,
Barked
the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,
Then struck a light, and kindled the camp-fire.
The wood was sovran with centennial trees,--

Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,

Linden and spruce. In strict society
Three conifers, white, pitch, and Norway pine,

Five-leaved, three-leaved, and two-leaved, grew thereby.
Our patron pine was fifteen
feet in girth,
The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.
'Welcome!' the wood god murmured through the leaves,--
'Welcome, though late,
unknowing, yet known to me.'
Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,

Which o'erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire.
Decayed millennial trunks, like
moonlight flecks,
Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.
Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft
In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,

Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,
And greet unanimous the joyful

change.
So fast will Nature acclimate her sons,
Though late returning to her pristine
ways.
Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;
And, in the forest, delicate clerks,
unbrowned,
Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds.
Up with the dawn, they
fancied the light air
That circled freshly in their forest dress
Made them to boys again.
Happier that they
Slipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind,
At the first
mounting of the giant stairs.
No placard on these rocks warned to the polls,
No
door-bell heralded a visitor,
No courier waits, no letter came or went,
Nothing was
ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold;
The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop,

The falling rain will spoil no holiday.
We were made freemen of the forest laws,

All dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends,
Essaying nothing she cannot perform.
In Adirondac lakes,
At morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded:
Shoes, flannel shirt,
and kersey trousers make
His brief toilette: at night, or in the rain,
He dons a surcoat
which he doffs at morn:
A paddle in the right hand, or an oar,
And in the left, a gun,
his needful arms.
By turns we praised the stature of our guides,
Their rival strength
and suppleness, their skill
To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp,
To climb a
lofty stem, clean without boughs
Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down:
Temper to
face wolf, bear, or