Poems of Nature, part 4, Snow Bound etc | Page 9

trees yielding?To the dull axe Time is wielding,?The shy mink and the otter,?And golden leaves and red,?By countless autumns shed,?Had floated down its water.
From the gray rocks of Cape Ann,?Came a skilled seafaring man,?With his dory, to the right place;?Over hill and plain he brought her,?Where the boatless Beareamp water?Comes winding down from White-Face.
Quoth the skipper: "Ere she floats forth;?I'm sure my pretty boat's worth,?At least, a name as pretty."?On her painted side he wrote it,?And the flag that o'er her floated?Bore aloft the name of Jettie.
On a radiant morn of summer,?Elder guest and latest comer?Saw her wed the Bearcamp water;?Heard the name the skipper gave her,?And the answer to the favor?From the Bay State's graceful daughter.
Then, a singer, richly gifted,?Her charmed voice uplifted;?And the wood-thrush and song-sparrow?Listened, dumb with envious pain,?To the clear and sweet refrain?Whose notes they could not borrow.
Then the skipper plied his oar,?And from off the shelving shore,?Glided out the strange explorer;?Floating on, she knew not whither,--?The tawny sands beneath her,?The great hills watching o'er her.
On, where the stream flows quiet?As the meadows' margins by it,?Or widens out to borrow a?New life from that wild water,?The mountain giant's daughter,?The pine-besung Chocorua.
Or, mid the tangling cumber?And pack of mountain lumber?That spring floods downward force,?Over sunken snag, and bar?Where the grating shallows are,?The good boat held her course.
Under the pine-dark highlands,?Around the vine-hung islands,?She ploughed her crooked furrow?And her rippling and her lurches?Scared the river eels and perches,?And the musk-rat in his burrow.
Every sober clam below her,?Every sage and grave pearl-grower,?Shut his rusty valves the tighter;?Crow called to crow complaining,?And old tortoises sat craning?Their leathern necks to sight her.
So, to where the still lake glasses?The misty mountain masses?Rising dim and distant northward,?And, with faint-drawn shadow pictures,?Low shores, and dead pine spectres,?Blends the skyward and the earthward,
On she glided, overladen,?With merry man and maiden?Sending back their song and laughter,--?While, perchance, a phantom crew,?In a ghostly birch canoe,?Paddled dumb and swiftly after!
And the bear on Ossipee?Climbed the topmost crag to see?The strange thing drifting under;?And, through the haze of August,?Passaconaway and Paugus?Looked down in sleepy wonder.
All the pines that o'er her hung?In mimic sea-tones sung?The song familiar to her;?And the maples leaned to screen her,?And the meadow-grass seemed greener,?And the breeze more soft to woo her.
The lone stream mystery-haunted,?To her the freedom granted?To scan its every feature,?Till new and old were blended,?And round them both extended?The loving arms of Nature.
Of these hills the little vessel?Henceforth is part and parcel;?And on Bearcamp shall her log?Be kept, as if by George's?Or Grand Menan, the surges?Tossed her skipper through the fog.
And I, who, half in sadness,?Recall the morning gladness?Of life, at evening time,?By chance, onlooking idly,?Apart from all so widely,?Have set her voyage to rhyme.
Dies now the gay persistence?Of song and laugh, in distance;?Alone with me remaining?The stream, the quiet meadow,?The hills in shine and shadow,?The sombre pines complaining.
And, musing here, I dream?Of voyagers on a stream?From whence is no returning,?Under sealed orders going,?Looking forward little knowing,?Looking back with idle yearning.
And I pray that every venture?The port of peace may enter,?That, safe from snag and fall?And siren-haunted islet,?And rock, the Unseen Pilot?May guide us one and all.?1880.
MY TRUST.
A picture memory brings to me?I look across the years and see?Myself beside my mother's knee.
I feel her gentle hand restrain?My selfish moods, and know again?A child's blind sense of wrong and pain.
But wiser now, a man gray grown,?My childhood's needs are better known,?My mother's chastening love I own.
Gray grown, but in our Father's sight?A child still groping for the light?To read His works and ways aright.
I wait, in His good time to see?That as my mother dealt with me?So with His children dealeth He.
I bow myself beneath His hand?That pain itself was wisely planned?I feel, and partly understand.
The joy that comes in sorrow's guise,?The sweet pains of self-sacrifice,?I would not have them otherwise.
And what were life and death if sin?Knew not the dread rebuke within,?The pang of merciful discipline?
Not with thy proud despair of old,?Crowned stoic of Rome's noblest mould!?Pleasure and pain alike I hold.
I suffer with no vain pretence?Of triumph over flesh and sense,?Yet trust the grievous providence,
How dark soe'er it seems, may tend,?By ways I cannot comprehend,?To some unguessed benignant end;
That every loss and lapse may gain?The clear-aired heights by steps of pain,?And never cross is borne in vain.?1880.
A NAME
Addressed to my grand-nephew, Greenleaf Whittier Pickard. Jonathan Greenleaf, in A Genealogy of the Greenleaf Family, says briefly: "From all that can be gathered, it is believed that the ancestors of the Greenleaf family were Huguenots, who left France on account of their religious principles some time in the course of the sixteenth century, and settled in England. The name was probably translated from the French Feuillevert."
The name the Gallic exile bore,?St. Malo! from thy ancient mart,?Became upon our Western shore?Greenleaf for Feuillevert.
A name