By the fireside there are old men seated, Of the past what it can ne'er restore them. By the fireside there are youthful dreamers, Of the Future what it cannot give them. And above them God the sole spectator. By the fireside there are peace and comfort, For a well-known footstep in the passage. Each man's chimney is his Golden Milestone; Through the gateways of the world around him. In his farthest wanderings still he sees it; When he sat with those who were, but are not. Happy he whom neither wealth nor fashion, Drives an exile From the hearth of his ancestral homestead. We may build more splendid habitations, Buy with gold the old associations! f Nor the red Mustang, Has a dash of Spanish bravado. For richest and best Is the wine of the West, Fills all the room And as hollow trees Are the haunts of bees, For ever going and coming; Is all alive With a swarming and buzzing and humming. Very good in its way Is the Verzenay, Or the Sillery soft and creamy; Has a taste more divine, More dulcet, delicious, and dreamy, There grows no vine As grows by the Beautiful River. Drugged is their juice For foreign use, When shipped o'er the reeling Atlantic, To rack our brains With the fever pains, That have driven the Old World frantic. To the sewers and sinks With all such drinks, And after them tumble the mixer; For a poison malign, Is such Borgia wine, Or at best but a Devil's Elixir. While pure as a spring Is the wine I sing, And to praise it, one needs but name it; For Catawba wine Has need of no sign, No tavern-bush to proclaim it. And this Song of the Vine, The winds and the birds shall deliver In her garlands dressed, On the banks of the Beautiful River. SANTA FILOMENA.81 WHENE'ER a noble deed is wrought, The tidal wave of deeper souls Honour to those whose words or deeds Raise us from what is low! Thus thought I, as by night I read The wounded from the battle-plain, Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And slow, as in a dream of bliss, As if a door in heaven should be On England's annals, through the long That light its rays shall cast A Lady with a lamp shall stand Nor even shall be wanting here THE DISCOVERER OF THE NORTH CAPE. A LEAF FROM KING ALFRED'S OROSIUS, OTHERE, the old sea-captain, Who dwelt in Helgoland, To King Alfred, the Lover of Truth His figure was tall and stately, Hearty and hale was Othere, His cheek had the colour of oak With a kind of Laugh in his speech, Like the sea-tide on a beach, As unto the King he spoke. And Alfred, King of the Saxons, "So far I live to the northward, No man lives north of me; To the east are wild mountain-chains, "So far I live to the northward, If you only sailed by day, With a fair wind all the way, More than a month you would sail, "I own six hundred reindeer, "I ploughed the land with horses, With their sagas of the seas;→ "Of Iceland and of Greenland, For thinking of those seas. "To the northward stretched the desert, And three days sailed due north, "To the west of me was the ocean, For the walrus or the whale, Till after three days more. "The days grew longer and longer, And southward through the haze Of the red midnight sun. "And then uprose before me, "The sea was rough and stormy, And the sea-fog, like a ghost, "Four days I steered to eastward, Four days without a night: Round in a fiery ring Went the great sun, O King, With red and lurid light.' |