LITMIR.BIZ

      It makes no difference abroad,

      The seasons fit the same,

      The mornings blossom into noons,

      And split their pods of flame.

      Wild-flowers kindle in the woods,

      The brooks brag all the day;

      No blackbird bates his jargoning

      For passing Calvary.

      Auto-da-fe and judgment

      Are nothing to the bee;

      His separation from his rose

      To him seems misery.

      The mountain sat upon the plain

      In his eternal chair,

      His observation omnifold,

      His inquest everywhere.

      The seasons prayed around his knees,

      Like children round a sire:

      Grandfather of the days is he,

      Of dawn the ancestor.

      I'll tell you how the sun rose, —

      A ribbon at a time.

      The steeples swam in amethyst,

      The news like squirrels ran.

      The hills untied their bonnets,

      The bobolinks begun.

      Then I said softly to myself,

      "That must have been the sun!"

      But how he set, I know not.

      There seemed a purple stile

      Which little yellow boys and girls

      Were climbing all the while

      Till when they reached the other side,

      A dominie in gray

      Put gently up the evening bars,

      And led the flock away.

      The butterfly's assumption-gown,

      In chrysoprase apartments hung,

         This afternoon put on.

      How condescending to descend,

      And be of buttercups the friend

         In a New England town!

      Of all the sounds despatched abroad,

      There's not a charge to me

      Like that old measure in the boughs,

      That phraseless melody

      The wind does, working like a hand

      Whose fingers brush the sky,

      Then quiver down, with tufts of tune

      Permitted gods and me.

      When winds go round and round in bands,

      And thrum upon the door,

      And birds take places overhead,

      To bear them orchestra,

      I crave him grace, of summer boughs,

      If such an outcast be,

      He never heard that fleshless chant

      Rise solemn in the tree,

      As if some caravan of sound

      On deserts, in the sky,

      Had broken rank,

      Then knit, and passed

      In seamless company.

      Apparently with no surprise

      To any happy flower,

      The frost beheads it at its play

      In accidental power.

      The blond assassin passes on,

      The sun proceeds unmoved

      To measure off another day

      For an approving God.

      'T was later when the summer went

      Than when the cricket came,

      And yet we knew that gentle clock

      Meant nought but going home.

      'T was sooner when the cricket went

      Than when the winter came,

      Yet that pathetic pendulum

      Keeps esoteric time.

      These are the days when birds come back,

      A very few, a bird or two,

      To take a backward look.

      These are the days when skies put on

      The old, old sophistries of June, —

      A blue and gold mistake.

      Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee,

      Almost thy plausibility

      Induces my belief,

      Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,

      And softly through the altered air

      Hurries a timid leaf!

      Oh, sacrament of summer days,

      Oh, last communion in the haze,

      Permit a child to join,

      Thy sacred emblems to partake,

      Thy consecrated bread to break,

      Taste thine immortal wine!

      The morns are meeker than they were,

      The nuts are getting brown;

      The berry's cheek is plumper,

      The rose is out of town.

      The maple wears a gayer scarf,

      The field a scarlet gown.

      Lest I should be old-fashioned,

      I'll put a trinket on.

      The sky is low, the clouds are mean,

      A travelling flake of snow

      Across a barn or through a rut

      Debates if it will go.

      A narrow wind complains all day

      How some one treated him;

      Nature, like us, is sometimes caught

      Without her diadem.

      I think the hemlock likes to stand

      Upon

Скачать книгу