led land,
Invaders crossed the sea,
Rushed from thy meadow-slopes a stalwart band,
To battle for the free.

Nor failed the pristine valor of the race
To guard the nation's life;
Thy hardy sons met treason face to face,
The foremost in the strife.

When locusts bloom and wild-rose scents the air,
When moonbeams fleck the stream,
And June's long twilights crimson shadows wear,
Here linger, gaze, and dream!

FOOTNOTES:

[F] One of the aboriginal names of Lake Champlain signifies the open
door of the country.

YESTERDAY.

There is a gleam of ultramarine,--which, most of all tints, say the
painters, possesses the quality of light in itself,--banished to the
farthest horizon of the ocean, where it lies all day, a line of infinite
richness, not to be drawn by Apelles, and in its compression of
expanse--leagues of sloping sea and summer calm being written in that
single line--suggestive of more depth than plummet or diver can ever
reach. Such an enchantment of color deepens the farther and interior
horizon with most men,--whether it is the atmosphere of one's own
identity still warming and enriching it, or whether the orbed course of
time has dropped the earthy part away, and left only the sunbeams
falling there. But Leonardo da Vinci supposed that the sky owed its blue
to the darkness of vast space behind the white lens of sunlit air; and
perhaps where the sea presents through the extent of its depth, as it
slips over into other hemispheres, tangents with the illumined
atmosphere beyond, it affords a finer filter for these blue rays, and
thenceforth hoards in its heart the wealth and beauty of tint found in
that line of ultramarine. Thus too, perhaps, in the eyes of these
fortunate men, every year of their deepening past presents only a purer
strain for such sunshine as is theirs, until it becomes indeed

"The light that never was, on sea or land."

The child's conjecture of the future is one of some great, bright, busy
thing beyond the hills or over the river. But the thought is not
definite: having nothing to remember, he has nothing by which to model
his idea.

The man looks back at the past in much the same manner, to be
sure,--always with something between,--if not the river or the hills, at
least a breath of mist out of which rises the vision he invokes; but the
vision has a shape, precise and clear.

If it is sadness that he seeks, sadn