Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/214

POEMS OF OCCASION One found an eagle's plume, and one the wand

Wherewith a seer divines:

Now but the Minstrel lingers of that pair,—

The rod has fallen from the mage's hand.

Gray on thy mountain height,

More fair than wonderland beside thy streams,

Thou with the splendors twain of youth and age,

This was the son who read thy heart aright,

Of whom thou wast beholden in his dreams,—

The one New-Englander! Upon whose page

Thine offspring still are animate, and move

Adown thy paths, a quaint and stately throng:

Grave men of God who made the olden law,

Fair maidens, meet for love,—

All living types that to the coast belong

Since Carver from the prow thy headland saw.

What should the master be

Who to the world New-England's self must render,

Her best interpreter, her very own?

How spake the brooding Mother, strong and tender,

Back-looking through her youth betwixt the moan

Of forests and the murmur of the sea?

"Thou too," she said, "must first be set aside

To keep my ancient vigil for a space,—

Taught by repression, by the combating

With thine own pride of pride,

An unknown watcher in a lonely place

With none on whom thine utterance to fling."

But first of all she fed

Her heart's own favorite upon the store

Of precious things she treasures in her woods,

Of charm and story in her valleys spread.

For him her whispering winds and brooks that pour

Made ceaseless music in the solitudes; 184