Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goes 60
Groping down to the sea ’neath his mountainous snows;
Where the lake’s frore Sahara of never-tracked white,
When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night
With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost,
As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost;
Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires that throw
Their own threatening shadows far round o’er the snow,
When the wolf howls aloof, and the wavering glare
Flashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear,
When the wood’s huge recesses, half-lighted, supply 70
A canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try,
Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not down
Through the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town,
But skulk in the depths of the measureless wood
Mid the Dark’s creeping whispers that curdle the blood,
When the eye, glanced in dread o’er the shoulder, may dream,
Ere it shrinks to the camp-fire’s companioning gleam,
That it saw the fierce ghost of the Red Man crouch back
To the shroud of the tree-trunk’s invincible black;
There the old shapes crowd thick round the pine-shadowed camp, 80
Which shun the keen gleam of the scholarly lamp,
And the seed of the legend finds true Norland ground,
While the border-tale’s told and the canteen flits round.

A CONTRAST

Thy love thou sendest oft to me,
  And still as oft I thrust it back;
Thy messengers I could not see
  In those who everything did lack,
  The poor, the outcast and the black.

Pride held his hand before mine eyes,
  The world with flattery stuffed mine ears;
I looked to see a monarch’s guise,
  Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years,
  Poor, naked, fettered, full of tears.

Yet, when I sent my love to thee,
  Thou with a smile didst take it in,
And entertain’dst it royally,
  Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin,
  And leprous with the taint of sin.

Now every day thy love I meet,
  As o’er the earth it wanders wide,
With weary step and bleeding feet,
  Still knocking at the heart of pride
  And offering grace, though still denied.

EXTREME UNCTION

Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be
  Alone with the consoler, Death;
Far sadder eyes than thine will see
  This crumbling clay yield up its breath;
These shrivelled hands have deeper stains
  Than holy oil can cleanse away,
Hands that have plucked the world’s coarse gains
  As erst they plucked the flowers of May.

Call, if thou canst, to these gray eyes
  Some faith from youth’s traditions wrung; 10
This fruitless husk which dustward dries
  Hath been a heart once, hath been young;
On this bowed head the awful Past
  Once laid its consecrating hands;
The Future in its purpose vast
  Paused, waiting my supreme commands.