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;—­ 209
    How with my life knit up is every well-known scene!

        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,[11]
    Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.

[Footnote 11:  In Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, which treats in prose of much the same period as this poem reproduces, Mr. Lowell has given more in detail his recollections of Washington Allston, the painter.  The whole paper may be read as a prose counterpart to this poem.  It is published in Fireside Travels.]

        Virgilium vidi tantum,—­I have seen[12] 225
      But as a boy, who looks alike on all,
        That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien,[13]
      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.

        Swiftly the present fades in memory’s glow,—­
      Our only sure possession is the past;
        The village blacksmith died a month ago,[14]
      And dim to me the forge’s roaring blast; 235
        Soon fire-new mediaevals we shall see
        Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree,
    And that hewn down, perhaps, the bee-hive green and vast.

        How many times, prouder than king on throne,
      Loosed from the village school-dame’s A’s and B’s, 240
        Panting have I the creaky bellows blown,
      And watched the pent volcano’s red increase,
        Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down
        By that hard arm voluminous and brown, 224
    From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.

[Footnote 12:  Virgilium vidi tantum, I barely saw Virgil, a Latin phrase applied to one who has merely had a glimpse of a great man.]