The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower,
  Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art;
The bumble-bee, within the last half-hour,
  Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart;
  While in the barnyard, under shed and cart,
Brood-hens have housed.—­But I, who scorned thy power,
  Barometer of the birds,—­like August there,—­
  Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair,
           Like some drenched truant, cower.

The Harvest Moon

I

Globed in Heav’n’s tree of azure, golden mellow
  As some round apple hung
High in hesperian boughs, thou hangest yellow
  The branch-like mists among: 
Within thy light a sunburnt youth, named Health,
  Rests ’mid the tasseled shocks, the tawny stubble;
And by his side, clad on with rustic wealth
  Of field and farm, beneath thy amber bubble,
A nut-brown maid, Content, sits smiling still: 
  While through the quiet trees,
  The mossy rocks, the grassy hill,
Thy silvery spirit glides to yonder mill,
  Around whose wheel the breeze
And shimmering ripples of the water play,
As, by their mother, little children may.

II

Sweet spirit of the moon, who walkest,—­lifting
  Exhaustless on thy arm,
A pearly vase of fire,—­through the shifting
  Cloud-halls of calm and storm,
Pour down thy blossoms! let me hear them come,
  Pelting with noiseless light the twinkling thickets,
Making the darkness audible with the hum
  Of many insect creatures, grigs and crickets: 
Until it seems the elves hold revelries
  By haunted stream and grove;
  Or, in the night’s deep peace,
The young-old presence of Earth’s full increase
  Seems telling thee her love,
Ere, lying down, she turns to rest, and smiles,
Hearing thy heart beat through the myriad miles.

The Old Water-Mill

Wild ridge on ridge the wooded hills arise,
Between whose breezy vistas gulfs of skies
Pilot great clouds like towering argosies,
And hawk and buzzard breast the azure breeze. 
With many a foaming fall and glimmering reach
Of placid murmur, under elm and beech,
The creek goes twinkling through long glows and glooms
Of woodland quiet, poppied with perfumes: 
The creek, in whose clear shallows minnow-schools
Glitter or dart; and by whose deeper pools
The blue kingfishers and the herons haunt;
That, often startled from the freckled flaunt
Of blackberry-lilies—­where they feed and hide—­
Trail a lank flight along the forestside
With eery clangor.  Here a sycamore,
Smooth, wave-uprooted, builds from shore to shore
A headlong bridge; and there, a storm-hurled oak
Lays a long dam, where sand and gravel choke
The water’s lazy way.  Here mistflower blurs
Its bit of heaven; there the oxeye stirs