Classic Poem

Over a height-of-land the trail
Wanders down to an inland sea
Where never a keel nor a mirrored sail
Has ruffled its broad tranquillity,
Save a golden shadow that fires the blue
As I drift across in my birch canoe.

On the long gray sweep of the windless shore,
The stately buck and the slender doe
Pick their steps down the sandy floor,
To the mouth of an indolent stream below,
And stand, thigh deep in the silver tide,
While the dawn-swept mists up the mountain glide.

High on the flank of a towering steep,
Brave in the sun my cabin stands,
And the sunbeams creep and the shadows creep
Aslant through the green of the timberlands;
On a log the gray of the lichen shines
In the somber dusk of the giant pines.

Often I hear in the morning hush,
Thin and far through the cedar-gloom,
The song of the wistful hermit-thrush,
Like a faëry harp on the shore of Doom.
And the ghostly white of the birch tree seems
As a spirit lost in the vale of dreams.

When evening's star-hung curtain falls
O'er hill and hollow, o'er stream and lake,
A wild loon calls—and another calls,
And the distant island echoes shake,
And sweet is the low wave's monotone,
As it floats the mosses on log and stone.

At night, when the silvered poplar leaves
Palpitate in the summer moon;
When the little owl in the alder grieves,
And the fox is hid in the fern of June;
I wait on the trail to my hidden sea
For Nannette, my belle, to come to me.