To make no step until the event is known,
And ills to come as evils past bemoan. 
Not so the wise; no coward watch he keeps
To spy what danger on his pathway creeps;
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth,—­his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there’s his road
By God’s own light illumined and foreshowed.

4

’T was one of the charmed days
When the genius of God doth flow;
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow;
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear. 
The musing peasant, lowly great,
Beside the forest water sate;
The rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown
Composed the network of his throne;
The wide lake, edged with sand and grass,
Was burnished to a floor of glass,
Painted with shadows green and proud
Of the tree and of the cloud. 
He was the heart of all the scene;
On him the sun looked more serene;
To hill and cloud his face was known,—­
It seemed the likeness of their own;
They knew by secret sympathy
The public child of earth and sky. 
‘You ask,’ he said, ’what guide
Me through trackless thickets led,
Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide. 
I found the water’s bed. 
The watercourses were my guide;
I travelled grateful by their side,
Or through their channel dry;
They led me through the thicket damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers’ camp,
Through beds of granite cut my road,
And their resistless friendship showed. 
The falling waters led me,
The foodful waters fed me,
And brought me to the lowest land,
Unerring to the ocean sand. 
The moss upon the forest bark
Was pole-star when the night was dark;
The purple berries in the wood
Supplied me necessary food;
For Nature ever faithful is
To such as trust her faithfulness. 
When the forest shall mislead me,
When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
’T will be time enough to die;
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field,
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of their departed lover.’

WOODNOTES II

As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.

’Whether is better, the gift or the donor? 
Come to me,’
Quoth the pine-tree,
’I am the giver of honor. 
My garden is the cloven rock,
And my manure the snow;
And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock,
In summer’s scorching glow. 
He is great who can live by me: 
The rough and bearded forester
Is better than the lord;
God fills the script and canister,