Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/199

Rh To spells of flower and shrub we yield
 * Against or with our will.

I climbed a hill path strange and new
 * With slow feet, pausing at each turn;

A sudden waft of west wind blew
 * The breath of the sweet fern.

That fragrance from my vision swept
 * The alien landscape; in its stead,

Up fairer hills of youth I stepped,
 * As light of heart as tread.

I saw my boyhood’s lakelet shine
 * Once more through rifts of woodland shade;

I knew my river’s winding line
 * By morning mist betrayed.

With me June’s freshness, lapsing brook,
 * Murmurs of leaf and bee, the call

Of birds, and one in voice and look
 * In keeping with them all.

A fern beside the way we went
 * She plucked, and, smiling, held it up,

While from her hand the wild, sweet scent
 * I drank as from a cup.

O potent witchery of smell!
 * The dust-dry leaves to life return,

And she who plucked them owns the spell
 * And lifts her ghostly fern.

Or sense or spirit? Who shall say
 * What touch the chord of memory thrills?

It passed, and left the August day
 * Ablaze on lonely hills.

Alton Bay to Sandwich Dome,
 * From Mad to Saco river,

For patriarchs of the primal wood
 * We sought with vain endeavor.

And then we said: “The giants old
 * Are lost beyond retrieval;

This pygmy growth the axe has spared
 * Is not the wood primeval.

“Look where we will o’er vale and hill,
 * How idle are our searches

For broad-girthed maples, wide-limbed oaks,
 * Centennial pines and birches!

“Their tortured limbs the axe and saw
 * Have changed to beams and trestles;

They rest in walls, they float on seas,
 * They rot in sunken vessels.

“This shorn and wasted mountain land
 * Of underbrush and boulder,—

Who thinks to see its full-grown tree
 * Must live a century older.”

At last to us a woodland path,
 * To open sunset leading,

Revealed the Anakim of pines
 * Our wildest wish exceeding.

Alone, the level sun before;
 * Below, the lake’s green islands;

Beyond, in misty distance dim,
 * The rugged Northern Highlands.

Dark Titan on his Sunset Hill
 * Of time and change defiant!

How dwarfed the common woodland seemed,
 * Before the old-time giant!

What marvel that, in simpler days
 * Of the world’s early childhood,

Men crowned with garlands, gifts, and praise
 * Such monarchs of the wild-wood?

That Tyrian maids with flower and song
 * Danced through the hill grove’s spaces,

And hoary-bearded Druids found
 * In woods their holy places?

With somewhat of that Pagan awe
 * With Christian reverence blending,

We saw our pine-tree’s mighty arms
 * Above our heads extending.

We heard his needles’ mystic rune,
 * Now rising, and now dying,

As erst Dodona’s priestess heard
 * The oak leaves prophesying.

Was it the half-unconscious moan
 * Of one apart and mateless,