Classic Poem

Looking athwart the valley's cleft,
Where nestles many a cosey farm
Beside the stream whose music low
For ever keeps its ancient charm,

For one I love, who, young and gay,
Full often wandered by its side,
Floating his wayward fancies down
To the great sea upon its tide,—

Looking through dreamy, half-shut eyes
Across to where the shining mist
Bathed all the woods and uplands dim
With purple and with amethyst,

I said, Why do we linger thus
Where all is sharp and bright and clear?
Seek we the pleasant land beyond,
And taste of its enchantments dear.

Agreed; and soon our faithful grays
Were plunging down the hill-side steep,
Where over lichen-crinkled walls
The tangled thickets nod and creep;

And past the spring that trickles down
Through ledges thick with brush and furze,
Where aspens show their silver pomp
And chestnuts drop their prickly burrs;

And o'er the little rattling bridge
That spans the pebbly, murmurous stream,
And on into the land that seemed
The mystic shadow of a dream.

And what to find? The smell of hay
New-mown, and gleam of mowers' scythes,
And purple milkweed hardly seen
For troops of golden butterflies;

And many a pleasant upland farm,
And many a sun-browned little maid,
And patient cattle half asleep
In many a maple's plenteous shade;

All this and more; but here nor there
One atom of the tender mist
That, from afar, had clothed the land
With purple and with amethyst.

But looking backward to the hills
Which we had left an hour before,
Behold the charm we came to seek
Was there! Down-folded softly o'er

Each dear familiar place it lay,—
The violet-tinted mystic haze;
And there had lain, hour after hour,
Through the long, sweet, mid-summer days;

While we, in all its splendor clad,
In Tyrian dyes right royally,
Had deemed that we must seek afar
Its perfect grace and mystery.