ame and honors--misty fogs
That climb at morn the ragged cliffs of life,
Veiling the ragged rocks and gloomy chasms,
And shaping airy castles on the top
With bristling battlements and looming towers;
But melt away into ethereal air
Beneath the blaze of the mid-summer sun,
Till cliffs and chasms and all the ragged rocks
Are bare, and all the castles crumbled away.

"There winds a river 'twixt two chains of hills--
Fir-capped and rugged monuments of time;
A level vale of rich alluvial land,
Washed from the slopes through circling centuries,
And sweet with clover and the hum of bees,
Lies broad between the rugged, somber hills.
Beneath a shade of willows and of elms
The river slumbers in this meadowy lap.
Down from the right there winds a babbling branch,
Cleaving a narrower valley through the hills.
A grand bald-headed hill-cone on the right
Looms like a patriarch, and above the branch
There towers another. I have seen the day
When those bald heads were plumed with lofty pines.
Below the branch and near the river bank,
Hidden among the elms and butternuts,
The dear old cottage stands where I was born.
An English ivy clambers to the eaves;
An English willow planted by my hand
Now spreads its golden branches o'er the roof
Not far below the cottage thrives a town,
A busy town of mills and merchandise--
Belle Meadows, fairest village of the vale.
Behind it looms the hill-cone, and in front
The peaceful river winds its silent way.
Beyond the river spreads a level plain--
Once hid with somber firs--a tangled marsh--
Now beautiful with fields and cottages,
And sweet in spring-time with the blooming plum,
And white with apple-blossoms blown like snow.
Beyond the plain a lower chain of hills,
In summer gemmed with fields of golden grain
Set in the emerald of the beechen woods.
In other days the village school-house stood
Below our cottage on a grassy mound
That sloped away unto the river's marge;
And on the slope a cluster of tall pines
Crowning a copse of beech and evergreen.
There in my boyhood days I went to school;
A maiden mistress ruled the little realm;
She taught the rudiments to rompish rogues,
And walked a queen with magic wand of birch.
My years were hardly ten when father died.
Sole tenants of our humble cottage home
My sorrowing mother and myself remained;
But she was all economy, and kept
With my poor aid a comfortable house.
I was her idol and she wrought at night
To keep me at my books, and use