Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/62

 Were choked with leaves, and on their ragged biers Lay dead the sweets of summer—damask rose, Clove pink, old-fashioned, loved New England flowers. Only keen, salt-sea odors filled the air. Sea-sounds, sea-odors—these were all my world. Hence it is that life languishes with me inland."

Infinite variance of changing moods has the hill which lifts such abrupt crags above the Ponkapoag plain. At times the poet may have seen it as it was one day not long ago, when a great thunder-*storm, born of the sweltering, blue haze of a fiercely hot July day, swept across it. On that day the hill withdrew itself into the menacing black sky, looming against it, then vanishing, becoming part of a night like that of the apocalypse, in which hung the observatory and the higher houses of Ponkapoag hill "as glaring as our sins on judgment day." The storm in which the miracle of "The Legend of Ara-Cœli" was wrought could not have been blacker than the sky, nor the face of the monk, when he saw the toes of the bambino beneath the door, whiter than gleamed those houses. The weirder, greater things of nature loom often through the poems of the man who looked upon such scenes from the study window in what was