May-Day | Page 6

you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here.?The sallow knows the basket-maker's thumb;?The oar, the guide's. Dare you accept the tasks?He shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes,?Tell the sun's time, determine the true north,?Or stumbling on through vast self-similar woods?To thread by night the nearest way to camp?
Ask you, how went the hours??All day we swept the lake, searched every cove,?North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,?Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,?Or whipping its rough surface for a trout;?Or bathers, diving from the rock at noon;?Challenging Echo by our guns and cries;?Or listening to the laughter of the loon;?Or, in the evening twilight's latest red,?Beholding the procession of the pines;?Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,?In the boat's bows, a silent night-hunter?Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds?Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist.?Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods?Is fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck?Who stands astonished at the meteor light,?Then turns to bound away,--is it too late?
Sometimes we tried our rifles at a mark,?Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;?Sometimes our wits at sally and retort,?With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle;?Or parties scaled the near acclivities?Competing seekers of a rumoured lake,?Whose unauthenticated waves we named?Lake Probability,--our carbuncle,?Long sought, not found.
Two Doctors in the camp?Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout's brain,?Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,?Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow, and moth;?Insatiate skill in water or in air?Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;?The while, one leaden pot of alcohol?Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.?Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants,?Orchis and gentian, fern, and long whip-scirpus,?Rosy polygonum, lake-margin's pride,?Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge, and moss,?Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.?Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,?The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker?Loud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.?As water poured through the hollows of the hills?To feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,?So Nature shed all beauty lavishly?From her redundant horn.
Lords of this realm,?Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day?Rounded by hours where each outdid the last?In miracles of pomp, we must be proud,?As if associates of the sylvan gods.?We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,?So pure the Alpine element we breathed,?So light, so lofty pictures came and went.?We trode on air, contemned the distant town,?Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned?That we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge,?And how we should come hither with our sons,?Hereafter,--willing they, and more adroit.
Hard fare, hard bed, and comic misery,--?The midge, the blue-fly, and the mosquito?Painted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:?But, on the second day, we heed them not,?Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,?Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.?For who defends our leafy tabernacle?From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd,--?Who but the midge, mosquito, and the fly,?Which past endurance sting the tender cit,?But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,?Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?
Our foaming ale we drunk from hunters' pans,?Ale, and a sup of wine. Our steward gave?Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;?All ate like abbots, and, if any missed?Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss?With hunters' appetite and peals of mirth.?And Stillman, our guides' guide, and Commodore,?Crusoe, Crusader, Pius AEneas, said aloud,?"Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating?Food indigestible":--then murmured some,?Others applauded him who spoke the truth.
Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought?Checked in these souls the turbulent heyday?'Mid all the hints and glories of the home.?For who can tell what sudden privacies?Were sought and found, amid the hue and cry?Of scholars furloughed from their tasks, and let?Into this Oreads' fended Paradise,?As chapels in the city's thoroughfares,?Whither gaunt Labour slips to wipe his brow,?And meditate a moment on Heaven's rest.?Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke?To each apart, lifting her lovely shows?To spiritual lessons pointed home.?And as through dreams in watches of the night,?So through all creatures in their form and ways?Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant,?Not clearly voiced, but waking a new sense?Inviting to new knowledge, one with old.?Hark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler??Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye.?Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,?Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,?Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?
And presently the sky is changed; O world!?What pictures and what harmonies are thine!?The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,?So like the soul of me, what if't were me??A melancholy better than all mirth.?Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,?Or at the foresight of obscurer years??Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory,?Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty?Superior to all its gaudy skirts.?And, that no day of life may lack romance,?The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down?A private beam into each several heart.?Daily the bending skies solicit man,?The seasons chariot him from this exile,?The rainbow