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.

        There gleams my native village, dear to me,
      Though higher change’s waves each day are seen, 205
        Whelming fields famed in boyhood’s history,
      Sanding with houses the diminished green;
        There, in red brick, which softening time defies,
        Stand square and stiff the Muses’ factories;—­
    How with my life knit up is every well-known scene! 210

        Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow
      To outward sight, and through your marshes wind;
        Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago,
      Your twin flows silent through my world of mind: 
        Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening’s gray! 215
        Before my inner sight ye stretch away,
    And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.

        Beyond the hillock’s house-bespotted swell,
      Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise,
        Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, 220
      Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise,
        Where dust and mud the equal year divide,
        There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died,
    Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.

        Virgilium vidi tantum,—­I have seen 225
      But as a boy, who looks alike on all,
        That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien. 
      Tremulous as down to feeling’s faintest call;—­
        Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame
        That thither many times the Painter came;—­ 230
    One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.