7. Often, perchance, the old man’s eye From a seaward casement would espy, Scanning the harborage in the bay, A ship which idly at anchor lay; Watching her as she rose and fell, Up and down, with the evening swell, Her cordage slackened, her sails unbent, And all her proud life somnolent. And perchance he thought—“My life, it seems, Like her, unfreighted with aught but dreams; Yet I feel within me a strength to dare Some outward voyage, I know not where!” But the forceful impulse wore away In the common life of every day, And for Hendrick Van Ghelt no timely hour Ruffled the calm of that hidden power; Yet in the prelude of my song His storied presence may well belong, As a Lombardy poplar, lithe and hoar, Stands at a Monmouth farmer’s door, Set like a spire against the sky, Marking the hours, while lover and maid Linger long in its stately shade, And round its summit the swallows fly. II. 1. Nature a devious by-way finds: solve me her secret whim, That the seed of a gnarled oak should sprout to a sapling straight and prim; That a russet should grow on the pippin stock, on the garden-rose a brier; That a stalwart race, in old Hendrick’s son, should smother its wonted fire. Hermann, fond of his book, and shirking the brawny out-door sports; Sent to college, and choosing for life the law with her mouldy courts; Proud, and of tender honor, as well became his father’s blood, But with cold and courtly self-restraint weighing the ill and good; Wed to a lady whose delicate veins that molten azure held, Ichor of equal birth, wherewith our gentry their couplings weld; Viewing his father’s careless modes with half a tolerant eye, As one who honors, regretting not, old fashions passing by. After a while the moment came when, unto the son and heir, A son and heir was given in turn,—a moment of joy and prayer; For the angel who guards the portals twain oped, in the self-same breath, To the child the pearly gate of life, to the mother the gate of death. Father, and son, and an infant plucking the daisies over a grave: The swell of a boundless surge keeps on, wave following after wave; Ever the tide of life sets toward the low invisible shore: Whence had the current its distant source? when shall it flow no more? 2. Nature’s serene renewals, that make the scion by one remove Bear the ancestral blossom and thrive as the forest wilding throve! Roseate stream of life, which hides the course its ducts pursue, To rise, like that Sicilian fount, in far-off springs anew! For the grandsire’s vigor, rude and rare, asleep in the son had lain, To waken in Hugh, the grandson’s frame, with the ancient force again; And ere the boy, said the Monmouth wives, had grown to his seventh year, Well could you tell whose mantling blood swelled in his temples clear.