Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion's hourly change
It all things else repairs.
In vain I look for change abroad,
And can no difference find,
Till some new ray of peace uncalled
Illumes my inmost mind.
What is it gilds the trees and clouds,
And paints the heavens so gay,
But yonder fast-abiding light
With its unchanging ray?
Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,
Upon a winter's morn,
Where'er his silent beams intrude,
The murky night is gone.
How could the patient pine have known
The morning breeze would come,
Or humble flowers anticipate
The insect's noonday hum, -
Till the new light with morning cheer
From far streamed through the aisles,
And nimbly told the forest trees
For many stretching miles?
I've heard within my inmost soul
Such cheerful morning news,
In the horizon of my mind
Have seen such orient hues,
As in the twilight of the dawn,
When the first birds awake,
Are heard within some silent wood,
Where they the small twigs break,
Or in the eastern skies are seen,
Before the sun appears,
The harbingers of summer heats
Which from afar he bears.
Whole weeks and months of my summer life slide away in thin
volumes like mist and smoke, till at length, some warm morning,
perchance, I see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to the
swamp, and I float as high above the fields with it. I can recall
to mind the stillest summer hours, in which the grasshopper sings
over the mulleins, and there is a valor in that time the bare
memory of which is armor that can laugh at any blow of fortune.
For our lifetime the strains of a harp are heard to swell and die
alternately, and death is but "the pause when the blast is
recollecting itself."
We lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of the brook,
in the angle formed by whose bank with the river our tent was
pitched, and there was a sort of human interest in its story,
which ceases not in freshet or in drought the livelong summer,
and the profounder lapse of the river was quite drowned by its
din. But the rill, whose
"Silver sands and pebbles sing
Eternal ditties with the spring,"
is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier
streams, on whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with
sunken rocks and the ruins of forests, from whose surface comes
up no murmur, are strangers to the icy fetters which bind fast a
thousand contributary rills.
I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before.
It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give
me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream
ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and I
received that compensation which I had never obtained in my
waking hours.
