The ruddy tints of health
On haggard face and form that drooped and fainted
In the fierce race for wealth;

"Till one arose, and from his pack's scant treasure
A hoarded volume drew,
And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure
To hear the tale anew;

"And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,
And as the fire-light fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the Master
Had writ of 'Little Nell:'

"Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy,--for the reader
Was youngest of them all,--
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall;

"The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp with 'Nell' on English meadows
Wandered and lost their way.

"And so in mountain solitudes--o'ertaken
As by some spell divine--
Their cares dropped from them like the needles shaken
From out the gusty pine.

"Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire;
And he who wrought that spell?--
Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!

"Lost is that camp! but let its fragrant story
Blend with the breath that thrills
With hop-vines' incense all the pensive glory
That fills the Kentish hills.

"And on that grave where English oak and holly
And laurel wreaths entwine,
Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,--
This spray of Western pine!

"July, 1870."

FOOTNOTES:

[29] I have mentioned the fact in my _Life of Landor_; and to the
passage I here add the comment made by Dickens when he read it: "It was
at a celebration of his birthday in the first of his Bath lodgings, 35,
St. James's Square, that the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in
the _Curiosity Shop_ first dawned on the genius of its creator. No
character in prose fiction was a greater favorite with Landor. He
thought that, upon her, Juliet might for a moment have turned her eyes
from Romeo, and that Desdemona might have taken her hair-breadth escapes
to heart, so interesting and pathetic did she seem to him; and when,
some years later, the circumstance I have named was recalled to him, he
broke into one of those whimsical bursts of comic