As weak, yet as trustful also;
      For the whole year long I see
    All the wonders of faithful Nature
      Still worked for the love of me;
    Winds wander, and dews drip earthward, 45
      Rain falls, suns rise and set,
    Earth whirls, and all but to prosper
      A poor little violet.

    This child is not mine as the first was,
      I cannot sing it to rest, 50
    I cannot lift it up fatherly
      And bliss it upon my breast;
    Yet it lies in my little one’s cradle
      And sits in my little one’s chair,
    And the light of the heaven she’s gone to 55
      Transfigures its golden hair.

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE

        What visionary tints the year puts on,
      When falling leaves falter through motionless air
        Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! 
      How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,
        As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills 5
        The bowl between me and those distant-hills,
    And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

        No more the landscape holds its wealth apart,
      Making me poorer in my poverty,
        But mingles with my senses and my heart; 10
      My own projected spirit seems to me
        In her own reverie the world to steep;
        ’T is she that waves to sympathetic sleep,
    Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree.

        How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, 15
      Clasped by the faint horizon’s languid arms,
        Each into each, the hazy distances! 
      The softened season all the landscape charms;
        Those hills, my native village that embay,
        In waves of dreamier purple roll away, 20
    And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

        Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee
      Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves;
        The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory
      Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves 25
        Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye
        Of Boaz as the maiden’s glow went by,
    So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.

        The cock’s shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,
      Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, 30
        Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,
      Southward, perhaps to far Magellan’s Straits;
        Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails;
        Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails,
    With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits. 35