[Footnote 13:  Undine is the heroine of a romantic tale by Baron De la Motte Fouque.  She is represented as a water-nymph who wins a human soul only by a union with mortality which brings pain and sorrow.]

[Footnote 14:  The village blacksmith of Longfellow’s well-known poem.  The prophecy came true as regards the hewing-down of the chestnut-tree which was cut down in 1876.]

        Dear native town! whose choking elms each year
      With eddying dust before their time turn gray,
        Pining for rain,—­to me thy dust is dear;
      It glorifies the eve of summer day,
        And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250
        The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns,
    The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away,

        So palpable, I’ve seen those unshorn few,
      The six old willows at the causey’s end
        (Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew), 255
      Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send,
        Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn thread,
        Where streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red,
    Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird’s flashes blend.

        Yes, dearer for thy dust than all that e’er, 260
      Beneath the awarded crown of victory,
        Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer;
      Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three,
        Yet collegisse juvat, I am glad[15]
        That here what colleging was mine I had,—­ 265
    It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!

[Footnote 15:  Collegisse juvat. Horace in his first ode says, Curriculo pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat; that is:  It’s a pleasure to have collected the dust of Olympus on your carriage-wheels.  Mr. Lowell, helping himself to the words, says, “It’s a pleasure to have been at college;” for college in its first meaning is a collection of men, as in the phrase “The college of cardinals.”]

        Nearer art thou than simply native earth,
      My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie;
        A closer claim thy soil may well put forth,
      Something of kindred more than sympathy; 270
        For in thy bounds I reverently laid away
        That blinding anguish of forsaken clay,
    That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,

        That portion of my life more choice to me
      (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole)[16] 275
        Than all the imperfect residue can be;—­
      The Artist saw his statue of the soul
        Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke,
        The earthen model into fragments broke, 279
    And without her the impoverished seasons roll.