EPIMETHEUS, OR THE POETS AFTERTHOUGHT.

HAVE I dreamed? or was it real,

What I saw as in a vision,

When to marches hymeneal,

In the land of the ideal,

Moved my thought o'er fields Elysian?
What are these the guests whose glances
Seemed like sunshine gleaming round me;
These the wild, bewildered fancies,
That with dithyrambic dances,

As with magic circles, bound me?

Ah! how cold are their caresses!

Pallid cheeks and haggard bosoms!
Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses,
And from loose, dishevelled tresses
Fall the hyacinthine blossoms!

O my songs! whose winsome measures
Filled my heart with secret rapture!
Children of my golden leisures!
Must even your delights and pleasures
Fade and perish with the capture?
Fair they seemed, those songs sonorous,
When they came to me unbidden;
Voices single, and in chorus,

Like the wild birds singing o'er us
In the dark of branches hidden.

Disenchantment! Dis-illusion!
Must each noble aspiration
Come at last to this conclusion,
Jarring discord, wild confusion,
Lassitude, renunciation?

Not with steeper fall nor faster,

From the sun's serene dominions,
Not through brighter realms nor vaster,
In swift ruin and disaster

Icarus fell with shattered pinions!

Sweet Pandora! dear Pandora!

Why did mighty Jove create thee

Coy as Thetis, fair as Flora,

Beautiful as young Aurora,

If to win thee is to hate thee?

No, not hate thee! for this feeling
Of unrest and long resistance

Is but passionate appealing,
A prophetic whisper stealing

O'er the chords of our existence.

Him whom thou dost once enamour,
Thou, beloved, never leavest;
In life's discord, strife, and clamour,
Still he feels thy spell of glamour;

Him of hope thou ne'er bereavest.

Weary hearts by thee are lifted,

Struggling souls by thee are strengthened, Clouds of fear asunder rifted,

Truth from falsehood cleansed and sifted, Lives, like days in summer, lengthened. Therefore art thou ever dearer,

O my Sibyl, my deceiver!

For thou makest each mystery clearer,
And the unattained seems nearer

When thou fillest my heart with fever!

Muse of all the Gifts and Graces!

Though the fields around us wither, There are ampler realms and spaces, Where no foot has left its traces;

Let us turn and wander thither.

THE SONG OF HIAWATHA.

INTRODUCTION.

SHOULD you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odours of the forest,

With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations,
As of thunder in the mountains?

I should answer, I should tell you,
"From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,

From the mountains, moors, and fenlands,

Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,

Feeds among the reeds and rushes.

I repeat them as I heard them

From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer."

Should you ask where Nawadaha
Found these songs, so wild and wayward,
Found these legends and traditions,
I should answer, I should tell you,
"In the birds'-nests of the forest,
In the lodges of the beaver,
In the hoof-prints of the bison,

In the eyrie of the eagle!

"All the wild-fowl sang them to him,
In the moorlands and the fenlands,
In the melancholy marshes;
Chetowaik, the plover, sang them,
Mahng, the loon, the wild goose, Wawa,
The blue heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
And the grouse, the Mushkodasa!"