Then, every morn, the river’s banks shine bright 155
      With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail,
        By the frost’s clinking hammers forged at night,
      ’Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail,
        Giving a pretty emblem of the day
        When guiltier arms in light shall melt away, 160
    And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war’s cramping mail.

        And now those waterfalls the ebbing river
      Twice every day creates on either side
        Tinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they shiver
      In grass-arched channels to the sun denied; 165
        High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow,
        The silvered flats gleam frostily below,
    Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the glassy tide.

        But crowned in turn by vying seasons three,
      Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; 170
        This glory seems to rest immovably,—­
      The others were too fleet and vanishing;
        When the hid tide is at its highest flow,
        O’er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow 174
    With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything.

        The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind,
      As pale as formal candles lit by day;
        Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind;
      The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play,
        Show pearly breakers combing o’er their lee, 180
        White crests as of some just enchanted sea,
    Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway.

        But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant,
      From mid-sea’s prairies green and rolling plains
        Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, 185
      And the roused Charles remembers in his veins
        Old Ocean’s blood and snaps his gyves of frost,
        That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost
    In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns.

        Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, 190
      With leaden pools between or gullies bare,
        The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice;
      No life, no sound, to break the grim despair,
        Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff
        Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, 195
    Or when the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there.

        But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes
      To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: 
        Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes;
      The early evening with her misty dyes 200
        Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh,
        Relieves the distant with her cooler sky,
    And tones the landscape down, and soothes the wearied eyes.