Our foaming ale we drunk from hunters’ pans,
Ale, and a sup of wine.  Our steward gave
Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;
All ate like abbots, and, if any missed
Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss
With hunters’ appetite and peals of mirth. 
And Stillman, our guides’ guide, and Commodore,
Crusoe, Crusader, Pius AEneas, said aloud,
“Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating
Food indigestible":—­then murmured some,
Others applauded him who spoke the truth.

Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought
Checked in these souls the turbulent heyday
’Mid all the hints and glories of the home. 
For who can tell what sudden privacies
Were sought and found, amid the hue and cry
Of scholars furloughed from their tasks, and let
Into this Oreads’ fended Paradise,
As chapels in the city’s thoroughfares,
Whither gaunt Labour slips to wipe his brow,
And meditate a moment on Heaven’s rest. 
Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke
To each apart, lifting her lovely shows
To spiritual lessons pointed home. 
And as through dreams in watches of the night,
So through all creatures in their form and ways
Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant,
Not clearly voiced, but waking a new sense
Inviting to new knowledge, one with old. 
Hark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler? 
Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye. 
Now soar again.  What wilt thou, restless bird,
Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,
Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?

And presently the sky is changed; O world! 
What pictures and what harmonies are thine! 
The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
So like the soul of me, what if’t were me? 
A melancholy better than all mirth. 
Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,
Or at the foresight of obscurer years? 
Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory,
Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty
Superior to all its gaudy skirts. 
And, that no day of life may lack romance,
The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down
A private beam into each several heart. 
Daily the bending skies solicit man,
The seasons chariot him from this exile,
The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,
The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

With a vermilion pencil mark the day
When of our little fleet three cruising skiffs
Entering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming Falls
Of loud Bog River, suddenly confront
Two of our mates returning with swift oars. 
One held a printed journal waving high
Caught from a late-arriving traveller,
Big with great news, and shouted the report
For which the world had waited, now firm fact,
Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,
And landed on our coast, and pulsating