COME, spread your wings, as I spread mine, Ah foolish dream! when Nature nursed And leave the crowded hall For where the eyes of twilight shine O'er evening's western wall. These are the pleasant Berkshire hills, A thousand rills; they leap and shine, A hundred brooks, and still they run 1 This and the following poem were read by Holmes as postludes to lectures given by him at the Lowell Institute in Boston, in 1853, on English Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. Two years later Lowell lectured at the same Institute on English Poetry from its Origins to Wordsworth, Her daughter in the West, The fount was drained that opened first; She bared her other breast. On the young planet's orient shore Her morning hand she tried; Then turned the broad medallion o'er And stamped the sunset side. Take what she gives, her pine's tall stem, Look on the forests' ancient kings, Yon trunk had thrice a hundred rings, Nor think that Nature saves her bloom And slights our grassy plain; 20 30 4C 5€ I saw the green banks of the castle-crowned Rhine, Where the grapes drink the moonlight and change it to wine; 1 See the notes on Whittier's The Last Walk in Autumn,' p. 292, and on Emerson's Written in Naples,' p. 60, and compare a recent sonnet on the Hudson by Mr. George S. Hellman: Where in its old historic splendor stands The home of England's far-famed Parliament, The memory, O Hudson, came to me Of one who went to seek the wide world o'er So, parted by the rolling flood, Of mingling smiles to bud and flower; Though fiery sun and stiffening cold (1861.) When, stricken by the freezing blast, No medal lifts its fretted face, Nor speaking marble cheats your eye, Yet, while these pictured lines I trace, A living image passes by: A roof beneath the mountain pines; These are the scenes: a boy appears; Yet pause upon the noontide hour, No gloom that stately shape can hide, 20 30 |