o me,
Though higher change's waves each day are seen, 205
Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history,
Sanding with houses the diminished green;
There, in red brick, which softening time defies,
Stand square and stiff the Muses' factories;-- 209
How with my life knit up is every well-known scene!

Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow
To outward sight, and through your marshes wind;
Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago,
Your twin flows silent through my world of mind;
Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray! 215
Before my inner sight ye stretch away,
And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.

Beyond the hillock's house-bespotted swell,
Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise,
Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, 220
Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise,
Where dust and mud the equal year divide,
There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died,[11]
Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.

[Footnote 11: In _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_, which treats in prose
of much the same period as this poem reproduces, Mr. Lowell has given
more in detail his recollections of Washington Allston, the painter.
The whole paper may be read as a prose counterpart to this poem. It is
published in _Fireside Travels_.]

_Virgilium vidi tantum_,--I have seen[12] 225
But as a boy, who looks alike on all,
That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien,[13]
Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;--
Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame
That thither many times the Painter came;-- 230
One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.

Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow,--
Our only sure possession is the past;
The village blacksmith died a month ago,[14]
And dim to me the forge's roaring blast; 235
Soon fire-new mediaevals we shall see
Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree,
And that hewn down, perhaps, the bee-hive green and vast.

How many times, prouder than king on throne,
Loosed from the village school-dame's A's and B's, 240
Panting have I the creaky