How sweet, when summer’s day was o’er,
    His violin’s mirth and wail,
  The walk on pleasant Newbury’s shore,
    The river’s moonlit sail!

  Ah! life is brief, though love be long
    The altar and the bier,
  The burial hymn and bridal song,
    Were both in one short year!

  Her rest is quiet on the hill
    Beneath the locust’s bloom;
  Far off her lover sleeps as still
    Within his scutcheoned tomb.

  The Gascon lord, the village maid
    In death still clasp their hands;
  The love that levels rank and grade
    Unites their severed lands.

  What matter whose the hill-side grave,
    Or whose the blazoned stone? 
  Forever to her western wave
    Shall whisper blue Garonne!

  O Love!—­so hallowing every soil
    That gives thy sweet flower room,
  Wherever, nursed by ease or toil,
    The human heart takes bloom!—­

  Plant of lost Eden, from the sod
    Of sinful earth unriven,
  White blossom of the trees of God
    Dropped down to us from heaven!—­

  This tangled waste of mound and stone
    Is holy for thy sake;
  A sweetness which is all thy own
    Breathes out from fern and brake.

  And while ancestral pride shall twine
    The Gascon’s tomb with flowers,
  Fall sweetly here, O song of mine,
    With summer’s bloom and showers!

  And let the lines that severed seem
    Unite again in thee,
  As western wave and Gallic stream
    Are mingled in one sea!

* * * * *

GALA-DAYS.

I.

Once there was a great noise in our house,—­a thumping and battering and grating.  It was my own self dragging my big trunk down from the garret.  I did it myself because I wanted it done.  If I had said, “Halicarnassus, will you fetch my trunk down?” he would have asked me what trunk? and what did I want of it? and would not the other one be better? and couldn’t I wait till after dinner?—­and so the trunk would probably have had a three-days’ journey from garret to basement.  Now I am strong in the wrists and weak in the temper; therefore I used the one and spared the other, and got the trunk down-stairs myself.  Halicarnassus heard the uproar.  He must have been deaf not to hear it; for the old ark banged and bounced, and scraped the paint off the stairs, and pitched head-foremost into the wall, and gouged out the plastering, and dinted the mop-board, and was the most stupid, awkward, uncompromising, unmanageable thing I ever got hold of in my life.

By the time I had zigzagged it into the back chamber, Halicarnassus loomed up the back stairs.  I stood hot and panting, with the inside of my fingers tortured into burning leather, the skin rasped off three knuckles, and a bruise on the back of my right hand, where the trunk had crushed it against a sharp edge of the door-way.