For where the eyes of twilight shine O'er evening's western wall.

These are the pleasant Berkshire hills,
Each with its leafy crown;
Hark! from their sides a thousand rills
Come singing sweetly down.

A thousand rills; they leap and shine,
Strained through the shadowy nooks, 10
Till, clasped in many a gathering twine,
They swell a hundred brooks.

A hundred brooks, and still they run
With ripple, shade, and gleam,

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,
Her elm with hanging spray;
She wears her mountain diadem
Still in her own proud way.

Look on the forests' ancient kings,
The hemlock's towering pride:

Yon trunk had thrice a hundred rings,
And fell before it died.

Nor think that Nature saves her bloom And slights our grassy plain;

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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,
And waters of the Thames in calm content
At England's fame flow slowly o'er their sands;
And where the Rhine past vine-entwined lands
Courses in castled beauty, there I went ;
And far to Southern rivers, flower-besprent ;
And to the icy streams of Northern strands.
Then mine own native shores I trod once more,
And, gazing on thy waters' majesty,

The memory, O Hudson, came to me

Of one who went to seek the wide world o'er
For Love, but found it not. Then home turned he
And saw his mother waiting at the door.

So, parted by the rolling flood,
The love that springs from common blood
Needs but a single sunlit hour

Of mingling smiles to bud and flower;
Unharmed its slumbering life has flown,
From shore to shore, from zone to zone,
Where summer's falling roses stain
The tepid waves of Pontchartrain,
Or where the lichen creeps below
Katahdin's wreaths of whirling snow.

Though fiery sun and stiffening cold
May change the fair ancestral mould,
No winter chills, no summer drains
The life-blood drawn from English veins,
Still bearing wheresoe'er it flows
The love that with its fountain rose,
Unchanged by space, unwronged by time,
From age to age, from clime to clime!

(1861.)

When, stricken by the freezing blast,
A nation's living pillars fall,
How rich the storied page, how vast,
A word, a whisper, can recall!

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;
The cloisters of a hill-girt plain;
The front of life's embattled lines;
A mound beside the heaving main.

These are the scenes: a boy appears;
Set life's round dial in the sun,
Count the swift arc of seventy years,
His frame is dust; his task is done.

Yet pause upon the noontide hour,
Ere the declining sun has laid
His bleaching rays on manhood's power,
And look upon the mighty shade.

No gloom that stately shape can hide,
No change uncrown its brow; behold!

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