Then eastward saw we slowly grow
Clear-edged the lines of roof and spire,
While great elm-masses blacken slow,
And linden-ricks their round heads show
Against a flush of widening fire. 70

Doubtful at first and far away,
The moon-flood creeps more wide and wide;
Up a ridged beach of cloudy gray,
Curved round the east as round a bay,
It slips and spreads its gradual tide.

Then suddenly, in lurid mood,
The disk looms large o’er town and field
As upon Adam, red like blood,
’Tween him and Eden’s happy wood,
Glared the commissioned angel’s shield. 80

Or let us seek the seaside, there
To wander idly as we list,
Whether, on rocky headlands bare,
Sharp cedar-horns, like breakers, tear
The trailing fringes of gray mist,

Or whether, under skies full flown,
The brightening surfs, with foamy din,
Their breeze-caught forelocks backward blown,
Against the beach’s yellow zone
Curl slow, and plunge forever in. 90

And, as we watch those canvas towers
That lean along the horizon’s rim,
‘Sail on,’ I’ll say; ’may sunniest hours
Convoy you from this land of ours,
Since from my side you bear not him!’

For years thrice three, wise Horace said,
A poem rare let silence bind;
And love may ripen to the shade,
Like ours, for nine long seasons laid
In deepest arches of the mind. 100

Come back!  Not ours the Old World’s good,
The Old World’s ill, thank God, not ours;
But here, far better understood,
The days enforce our native mood,
And challenge all our manlier powers.

Kindlier to me the place of birth
That first my tottering footsteps trod;
There may be fairer spots of earth,
But all their glories are not worth
The virtue in the native sod. 110

Thence climbs an influence more benign
Through pulse and nerve, through heart and brain;
Sacred to me those fibres fine
That first clasped earth.  Oh, ne’er be mine
The alien sun and alien rain!

These nourish not like homelier glows
Or waterings of familiar skies,
And nature fairer blooms bestows
On the heaped hush of wintry snows,
In pastures dear to childhood’s eyes, 120

Than where Italian earth receives
The partial sunshine’s ampler boons,
Where vines carve friezes ’neath the eaves,
And, in dark firmaments of leaves,
The orange lifts its golden moons.

THE NOMADES

What Nature makes in any mood
To me is warranted for good,
Though long before I learned to see
She did not set us moral theses,
And scorned to have her sweet caprices
Strait-waistcoated in you or me.

I, who take root and firmly cling,
Thought fixedness the only thing;
Why Nature made the butterflies,
(Those dreams of wings that float and hover 10
At noon the slumberous poppies over,)
Was something hidden from mine eyes,