The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, As pale as formal candles lit by day; Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind; The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play, Show pearly breakers combing o'er their lee, White crests as of some just enchanted sea, Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway. But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant, From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, And the roused Charles remembers in his veins Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost, That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns. Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, With leaden pools between or gullies bare, The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice; No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, Or when the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there. But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes; The early evening with her misty dyes Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, And tones the landscape down, and soothes the wearied eyes. There gleams my native village, dear to me, Though higher change's waves each day are seen, Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, Sanding with houses the diminished green; There, in red brick, which softening time defies, Stand square and stiff the Muses' factories;-- How with my life knit up is every well-known scene! Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow To outward sight, and through your marshes wind; Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago, Your twin flows silent through my world of mind: Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray! Before my inner sight ye stretch away, And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind. Beyond that hillock's house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise, Where dust and mud the equal year divide, There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died, Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze. _Virgilium vidi tantum_,--I have seen But as a boy, who looks alike on all, That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;-- Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame That thither many times the Painter came;-- One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.