So up the long and shorn foot-hills
The mountain road should creep;
So, green and low, the meadow fold
Its red-haired kine asleep.

The river wound as it should wind; Their place the mountains took; The white torn fringes of their clouds Wore no unwonted look;

Yet ne'er before that river's rim
Was pressed by feet of mine;
Never before mine eyes had crossed
That broken mountain line.

A presence, strange at once and known,
Walked with me as my guide;
The skirts of some forgotten life
Trailed noiseless at my side.

Was it a dim-remembered dream?
Or glimpse through æons old?
The secret which the mountains kept
The river never told.

But from the vision ere it passed

A tender hope I drew,

And, pleasant as a dawn of spring,

The thought within me grew,

That love would temper every change,
And soften all surprise,

And, misty with the dreams of earth,

The hills of Heaven arise.

Whittier

COM

EVENTIDE.

OMES something down with eventide,
Beside the sunset's golden bars,

Beside the floating scents, beside
The twinkling shadows of the stars.

Upon the river's rippling face,

Flash after flash the white
Broke up in many a shallow place ;
The rest was soft and bright.

By chance my eye fell on the stream;
How many a marvellous power

Sleeps in us, sleeps, and doth not dream!
This knew I in that hour.

For then my heart, so full of strife,

No more was in me stirred;

My life was in the river's life,

And I nor saw nor heard.

I and the river, we were one:
The shade beneath the bank,
I felt it cool; the setting sun
Into my spirit sank.

A rushing thing in power serene
I was; the mystery

I felt of having ever been

And being still to be.

Was it a moment or an hour?
I knew not; but I mourned

When, from that realm of awful power
I to these fields returned.

Thomas Burbridge.

NEARING THE SNOW LINE.

LOW toiling upward from the misty vale,

SLO

I leave the bright enamelled zones below;
No more for me their beauteous bloom shall glow,
Their lingering sweetness load the morning gale;
Few are the slender flowerets, scentless, pale,

That on their ice-clad stems all trembling blow
Along the margin of unmelting snow;
Yet with unsaddened voice thy verge I hail,
White realm of peace above the flowering line;
Welcome thy frozen domes, thy rocky spires!

O'er thee undimmed the moon-girt planets shine, On thy majestic altars fade the fires

That filled the air with smoke of vain desires,

And all the unclouded blue of heaven is thine!

Holmes.

YET

AGE AN EMINENCE.

́ET have I thought that we might also speak,
And not presumptuously, I trust, of Age,

As of a final EMINENCE; though bare

In aspect and forbidding, yet a point
On which 'tis not impossible to sit
In awful sovereignty; a place of power,
A throne, that may be likened unto his,
Who, in some placid day of summer, looks

Down from a mountain-top,

say one of those

High peaks, that bound the vale where now we are.

Faint, and diminished to the gazing eye,

Forest and field, and hill and dale appear,

With all the shapes over their surface spread:
But while the gross and visible frame of things
Relinquishes its hold upon the sense,
Yea almost on the Mind herself, and seems
All unsubstantialized, how loud the voice
Of waters, with invigorated peal
From the full river in the vale below
Ascending! For on that superior height
Who sits, is disencumbered from the press
Of near obstructions, and is privileged

To breathe in solitude, above the host

Of ever-humming insects, 'mid thin air

That suits not them. The murmur of the leaves

Many and idle visits not his ear:

This he is freed from, and from thousand notes
(Not less unceasing, not less vain than these)
By which the finer passages of sense

Are occupied; and the Soul, that would incline
To listen, is prevented or deterred.

And may it not be hoped, that, placed by age
In like removal, tranquil though severe,
We are not so removed for utter loss;
But for some favor, suited to our need?

What more than that the severing should confer
Fresh power to commune with the invisible world,
And hear the mighty stream of tendency
Uttering, for elevation of our thought,
A clear, sonorous voice, inaudible

To the vast multitude; whose doom it is
To run the giddy round of vain delight,
Or fret and labor on the Plain below.

Wordsworth.

H'

VEILED.

E stood there, a shape Titanic

In the midst of the shining range;

Moment by moment his features

Beamed with some wonderful change: