Broke in the beech and washed among the pine,
And ebbed to silence; but at the welcome sound--
Leaving my lazy book without a mark,
In hopes to lose among the blowing fern
The dregs of headache brought from yesternight,
And stepping lightly lest the children hear--
I from a side door slipped, and crossed a lane
With bitter Mayweed lined, and over a field
Snapping with grasshoppers, until I came
Down where an interrupted brook held way
Among the alders. There, on a strutting branch
Leaving my straw, I sat and wooed the west,
With breast and palms outspread as to a fire.

These powers of observation are again illustrated in a poem of quite
different import, called _Margites_, a lyric of thirteen stanzas, some
of which are inexcusably crude. It begins:

I neither plow the field nor sow,
Nor hold the spade nor drive the cart,
Nor spread the heap, nor hill nor hoe,
To keep the barren land in heart.

After four more stanzas in similar vein, comes this bit of magic
word-painting, so instinct with our New England Autumn, yet so
entirely the work of a realist, with his eye on the object:

But, leaning from my window, chief
I mark the Autumn's mellow signs--
The frosty air, the yellow leaf,
The ladder leaning on the vines.

The maple from his brood of boughs
Puts northward out a reddening limb;
The mist draws faintly round the house;
And all the headland heights are dim.

The poem then continues to its close:

And yet it is the same as when
I looked across the chestnut woods,
And saw the barren landscape then
O'er the red bunch of lilac buds;

And all things seem the same. 'Tis one
To lie in sleep, or toil as they
Who rise beforetime with the sun,
And so keep footstep with their day;

For aimless oaf and wiser fool
Work to one end by differing deeds;--
The weeds rot in the standing pool;
The water stagnates in the weeds;

And all by waste or warfare falls,
Has gone to wreck, or crumbling goes,
Since Nero planned his golden walls,
Or the Cham Cublai built his house.

But naught I reck of change and fray;
Watching the clouds at morning driven,
The still declension of the day;
And, when the moon is just in heaven,

I walk, unknowing where or why;
Or idly lie beneath the pine,
And bite