The old horse thrust his long head out,
And grave with wonder gazed about;
The cock his lusty greeting said,
And forth his speckled harem led;
The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked,
And mild reproach of hunger looked;
The horned patriarch of the sheep,
Like Egypt's Amun roused from sleep,
Shook his sage head with gesture mute,
And emphasized with stamp of foot.

All day the gusty north wind bore
The loosening drift its breath before;
Low circling round its southern zone,
The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone.
No church bell lent its Christian tone
To the savage air, no social smoke
Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.
A solitude made more intense
By dreary-voicèd elements,

The shrieking of the mindless wind,
The moaning tree boughs swaying blind,
And on the glass the unmeaning beat
Of ghostly finger tips of sleet.
Beyond the circle of our hearth
No welcome sound of toil or mirth
Unbound the spell, and testified
Of human life and thought outside.
We minded that the sharpest ear
The buried brooklet could not hear,
The music of whose liquid lip
Had been to us companionship,
And, in our lonely life, had grown
To have an almost human tone.

As night drew on, and, from the crest
Of wooded knolls that ridged the west,
The sun, a snow-blown traveler, sank
From sight beneath the smothering bank,
We piled with care our nightly stack
Of wood against the chimney back,—
The oaken log, green, huge, and thick,
And on its top the stout back-stick;

The knotty forestick laid apart,
And filled between with curious art
The ragged brush; then, hovering near,
We watched the first red blaze appear,
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam
On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,
Until the old, rude-furnished room
Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;
While radiant with a mimic flame
Outside the sparkling drift became,
And through the bare-boughed lilac tree
Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free.
The crane and pendent trammels showed,
The Turks' heads on the andirons glowed;
While childish fancy, prompt to tell
The meaning of the miracle,

Whispered the old rhyme: "Under the tree
When fire outdoors burns merrily,
There the witches are making tea."

The moon above the eastern wood
Shone at its full; the hill-range stood
Transfigured in the silver flood,

Its blown snows flashing cold and keen,
Dead white, save where some sharp ravine
Took shadow, or the somber green

Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black
Against the whiteness of their back.
For such a world and such a night
Most fitting that unwarming light,
Which only seemed where'er it fell
To make the coldness visible.

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed,

IT cannot be denied that the poet, though born and not made, must be strongly influenced by his early surroundings. John Greenleaf Whittier was but little indebted to scholarly culture or to art or to literary companionship; he was self-made and largely self-taught. Born near Haverhill, Mass., on December 17th, 1807, he worked on his father's farm and received the rudiments of education at home. After he was seventeen years old, he attended the Haverhill Academy for two terms, and at nineteen he began to contribute anonymous poems to the Free Press, edited by Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Then began a friendship between the editor and the young poet which was cemented by their joint activity in the great Abolition Contest. Whittier wrote fervid anti-slavery lyrics, edited newspapers in Boston, Haverhill and Hartford, and was for a year a member of the Massachusetts legislature. In 1831, he published his first collection of poems, "Legends of New England," a number of Indian traditions, and shortly afterwards a poetical tale, "Mogg Megone." In 1836 he was appointed secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and later became editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, in Philadelphia. But the abolition cause was intensely unpopular; the printing office was at one time sacked and burned, and the editor was forced many times to face enraged mobs. In the Freeman appeared some of Whittier's best anti-slavery lyrics. There was crude force in these scornfully indignant lyrics, for though Whittier inherited Quaker blood, and adhered to the Quaker practice, he was a fiery apostle of human brotherhood. His health was always delicate, which he attributed to the "toughening" process, common when he was a boy. In 1840, he settled down at

Across the mournful marbles play!
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death,

And Love can never lose its own!

We sped the time with stories old,
Wrought puzzles out, and riddles told,
Or stammered from our school-book lore
"The chief of Gambia's golden shore."
How often since, when all the land
Was clay in Slavery's shaping hand,
As if a far-blown trumpet stirred
The languorous, sin-sick air, I heard
"Does not the voice of reason cry,

Claim the first right which Nature gave,
From the red scourge of bondage fly
Nor deign to live a burdened slave!"
Our father rode again his ride
On Memphremagog's wooded side;
Sat down again to moose and samp
In trapper's hut and Indian camp;
Lived o'er the old idyllic ease
Beneath St. François' hemlock trees;
Again for him the moonlight shone
On Norman cap and bodiced zone;
Again he heard the violin play
Which led the village dance away,
And mingled in its merry whirl
The grandam and the laughing girl.
Or, nearer home, our steps he led
Where Salisbury's level marshes spread
Mile-wide as flies the laden bee;

Where merry mowers, hale and strong,
Swept, scythe on scythe, their swaths along
The low green prairies of the sea.
We shared the fishing off Boar's Head,

And round the rocky Isles of Shoals
The hake-broil on the driftwood coals;
The chowder on the sand-beach made,
Dipped, by the hungry, steaming hot,
With spoons of clam-shell from the pot.
We heard the tales of witchcraft old,

THE WORSHIP of Nature.

THE harp at Nature's advent strung
Has never ceased to play;

The song the stars of morning sung

Has never died away.

And prayer is made, and praise is given,
By all things near and far;

The ocean looketh up to heaven,
And mirrors every star.

Its waves are kneeling on the strand,
As kneels the human knee,

Their white locks bowing to the sand,
The priesthood of the sea!

They pour their glittering treasures forth,
Their gifts of pearl they bring,
And all the listening hills of earth
Take up the song they sing.

The green earth sends her incense up
From many a mountain shrine;
From folded leaf and dewy cup
She pours her sacred wine.

The mists above the morning rills
Rise white as wings of prayer;

The altar curtains of the hills

Are sunset's purple air.

The winds with hymns of praise are loud, Or low with sobs of pain,

The thunder-organ of the cloud,

The dropping tears of rain.

With drooping head and branches crossed
The twilight forest grieves,

Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost
From all its sunlit leaves.