Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?
Such should, methinks, its music be;
The sweetest name that mortals bear

Were best befitting thee;
And she to whom it once was given,
Was half of earth and half of heaven.

I hear thy voice, I see thy smile,

I look upon thy folded hair; Ah! while we dream not they beguile, Our hearts are in the snare; And she who chains a wild bird's wing Must start not if her captive sing.

So, lady, take the leaf that falls,

To all but thee unseen, unknown: When evening shades thy silent walls, Then read it all alone;

In stillness read, in darkness seal,
Forget, despise, but not reveal!

1831.

grandpapa! forgive

This erring lip its smiles

Vowed she should make the finest girl Within a hundred miles;

He sent her to a stylish school;

"T was in her thirteenth June; And with her, as the rules required, 'Two towels and a spoon.'

They braced my aunt against a board,
To make her straight and tall;
They laced her up, they starved her down,
To make her light and small;

They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,
They screwed it up with pins;

Oh, never mortal suffered more
In penance for her sins.

So, when my precious aunt was done,
My grandsire brought her back
(By daylight, lest some rabid youth
Might follow on the track);
'Ah!' said my grandsire, as he shook
Some powder in his pan,
'What could this lovely creature do
Against a desperate man!'

Alas! nor chariot, nor barouche,
Nor bandit cavalcade,
Tore from the trembling father's arms
His all-accomplished maid.
For her how happy had it been !

And Heaven had spared to me
To see one sad, ungathered rose
On my ancestral tree.

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40

1831.

1 The poem was suggested by the sight of a figure well known to Bostonians [in 1831 or 1832], that of Major Thomas Melville, the last of the cocked hats,' as he was sometimes called. The Major had been a personable young man, very evidently, and retained evidence of it in

The monumental pomp of age

which had something imposing and something odd about it for youthful eyes like mine. He was often pointed at as one of the Indians' of the famous Boston Tea-Party' of 1774. His aspect among the crowds of a later generation reminded me of a withered leaf which has held to its stem through the storms of autumn and winter, and finds itself still clinging to its bough while the new growths of spring are bursting their buds and spreading their foliage all around it. I make this explanation for the benefit of those who have been puzzled by the lines,

The way in which it came to be written in a somewhat singular measure was this. I had become a little known as a versifier, and I thought that one or two other young writers were following my efforts with imitations, not meant as parodies and hardly to be considered improvements on their models. I determined to write in a measure which would at once betray any copyist. So far as it was suggested by any previous poem, the echo must have come from Campbell's 'Battle of the Baltic,' with its short terminal lines, such as the last of these two,

By thy wild and stormy steep. Elsinore.

But I do not remember any poem in the same measure, except such as have been written since its publication. (HOLMES.)

Holmes wrote to his publishers in 1894: 'I have lasted long enough to serve as an illustration of my own poem. It was with a smile on my lips that

I wrote it; I cannot read it without a sigh of tender remembrance. I hope it will not sadden my older readers, while it may amuse some of the younger ones to whom its experiences are as yet only floating fancies.' Lincoln called the poem inexpressibly touching,' and knew it by heart. Holmes possessed a copy of it written out by Edgar Allan Poe. Whittier (Prose Works, vol. iii, p. 381) called it a unique compound of humor and pathos.'

1831 or 1832.

LA GRISETTE

20

30

1833.2

And only left to memory's trance A shadow and a name.

The few strange words my lips had taught
Thy timid voice to speak,

Their gentler signs, which often brought
Fresh roses to thy cheek,
The trailing of thy long loose hair
Bent o'er my couch of pain,

All, all returned, more sweet, more fair;
Oh, had we met again!

I walked where saint and virgin keep
The vigil lights of Heaven,

I knew that thou hadst woes to weep,
And sins to be forgiven;

I watched where Genevieve was laid,
I knelt by Mary's shrine,
Beside me low, soft voices prayed;
Alas! but where was thine?

And when the morning sun was bright, When wind and wave were calm, And flamed, in thousand-tinted light, The rose of Notre Dame,

I wandered through the haunts of men, From Boulevard to Quai,

10

20

30

And long upon the stranger's shore My voice on thee may call,

ON LENDING A PUNCH-BOWL'

THIS ancient silver bowl of mine, it tells of good old times,

Of joyous days and jolly nights, and merry Christmas chimes;

honest, brave, and true,

Who dipped their ladle in the punch when this old bowl was new.