He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt,
  Who, mid some council of the sad-garbed whites,
    Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt,
  With distant eye broods over other sights, 60
    Sees the hushed wood the city’s flare replace,
    The wounded turf heal o’er the railway’s trace,
And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

    The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost,
  And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry,
    After the first betrayal of the frost,
  Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky;
    The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold,
    To the faint Summer, beggared now and old,
Pour back the sunshine hoarded ’neath her favoring eye. 70

    The ash her purple drops forgivingly
  And sadly, breaking not the general hush;
    The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea,
  Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush;
    All round the wood’s edge creeps the skirting blaze
    Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days,
Ere the rain fall, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

    O’er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone,
  Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine
    Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80
  Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine,
    The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves
    A prickly network of ensanguined leaves;
Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.

    Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary,
  Whose loose blocks topple ’neath the ploughboy’s foot,
    Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye,
  Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot,
    The woodbine up the elm’s straight stem aspires,
    Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires; 90
In the ivy’s paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.

    Below, the Charles, a stripe of nether sky,
  Now hid by rounded apple-trees between,
    Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by,
  Now flickering golden through a woodland screen,
    Then spreading out, at his next turn beyond,
    A silver circle like an inland pond—­
Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.

    Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight
  Who cannot in their various incomes share, 100
    From every season drawn, of shade and light,
  Who sees in them but levels brown and bare;
    Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free
    On them its largess of variety,
For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.

    In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green,
  O’er which the light winds run with glimmering feet: 
    Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen,
  There, darker growths o’er hidden ditches meet;
    And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd, 110
    As if the silent shadow of a cloud
Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.