Unknown, yet well known to the eye of faith! Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay, When slumbered in his cave the water wraith, And the waves gently kissed the classic shore Of France or Italy, beneath the moon, When earth lay tranced in a dreamless swoon; And every time the music rose, before Mine inner vision rose a form sublime, Thy form, O tree! as in my happy prime I saw thee in my own loved native clime. But not because of its magnificence Dear is the Casuarina to my soul: Beneath it we have played: though years may roll, O sweet companions, loved with love intense, For your sakes shall the tree be ever dear! Blent with your images, it shall arise In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes. What is that dirge-like murmur that I hear Like the sea breaking on a shingle beach? It is the tree's lament, an eerie speech, That haply to the Unknown Land may reach. When first my casement is wide open thrown At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest; Sometimes,--and most in winter,--on its crest A gray baboon sits statue-like alone, Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs His puny offspring leap about and play; And far and near kokilas hail the day; And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows; And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast, The water-lilies spring, like snow enmassed. JOHN S. DWIGHT (1813-1893) John Sullivan Dwight was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 13th, 1813. After graduation at Harvard in 1832, he studied at the Divinity School, and for two years was pastor of a Unitarian church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He then became interested in founding the famous Brook Farm community, which furnished Hawthorne with the background for 'The Blithedale Romance'; and he is mentioned in the preface to this book with Ripley, Dana, Channing, Parker, etc. This was a "community" scheme, undertaken by joint ownership in a farm in West Roxbury near Boston; associated with the names of Hawthorne, Emerson, George William Curtis, and C.A. Dana,--a scheme which Emerson called "a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of reason in a patty-pan." This community existed seven years, and to quote again from Emerson,--"In Brook Farm was this peculiarity, that there was no head. In every family is the father; in every factory a foreman; in a shop a master; in a boat the skipper; but in this Farm no authority; each was master or mistress of their actions; happy, hapless anarchists."