Pictures

I.

Light, warmth, and sprouting greenness, and o'er all Blue, stainless, steel-bright ether, raining down Tranquillity upon the deep-hushed town, The freshening meadows, and the hillsides brown; Voice of the west-wind from the hills of pine, And the brimmed river from its distant fall, Low hum of bees, and joyous interlude Of bird-songs in the streamlet-skirting wood,-- Heralds and prophecies of sound and sight, Blessed forerunners of the warmth and light, Attendant angels to the house of prayer, With reverent footsteps keeping pace with mine,-- Once more, through God's great love, with you I share A morn of resurrection sweet and fair As that which saw, of old, in Palestine, Immortal Love uprising in fresh bloom From the dark night and winter of the tomb! 2d, 5th mo., 1852.

II.

White with its sun-bleached dust, the pathway winds Before me; dust is on the shrunken grass, And on the trees beneath whose boughs I pass; Frail screen against the Hunter of the sky, Who, glaring on me with his lidless eye, While mounting with his dog-star high and higher Ambushed in light intolerable, unbinds The burnished quiver of his shafts of fire. Between me and the hot fields of his South A tremulous glow, as from a furnace-mouth, Glimmers and swims before my dazzled sight, As if the burning arrows of his ire Broke as they fell, and shattered into light; Yet on my cheek I feel the western wind, And hear it telling to the orchard trees, And to the faint and flower-forsaken bees, Tales of fair meadows, green with constant streams, And mountains rising blue and cool behind, Where in moist dells the purple orchis gleams, And starred with white the virgin's bower is twined. So the o'erwearied pilgrim, as he fares Along life's summer waste, at times is fanned, Even at noontide, by the cool, sweet airs Of a serener and a holier land, Fresh as the morn, and as the dewfall bland. Breath of the blessed Heaven for which we pray, Blow from the eternal hills! make glad our earthly way! 8th mo., 1852.