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.]

[Footnote 13: Undine is the heroine of a romantic tale by Baron De la
Motte Fouque. She is represented as a water-nymph who wins a human
soul only by a union with mortality which brings pain and sorrow.]

[Footnote 14: The village blacksmith of Longfellow's well-known poem.
The prophecy came true as regards the hewing-down of the chestnut-tree
which was cut down in 1876.]

Dear native town! whose choking elms each year
With eddying dust before their time turn gray,
Pining for rain,--to me thy dust is dear;
It glorifies the eve of summer day,
And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250
The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns,
The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away,

So palpable, I've seen those unshorn few,
The six old willows at the causey's end
(Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew), 255
Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send,
Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn thread,
Where streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red,
Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird's flashes blend.

Yes, dearer for thy dust than all that e'er, 260
Beneath the awarded crown of victory,
Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer;
Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three,
Yet _collegisse juvat_, I am glad[15]
That here what colleging was mine I had,-- 265
It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!

[Footnote 15: _Collegisse juvat._ Horace in his first ode says,
_Curriculo pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat_; that is: _It's a
pleasure to have collected_ the dust of Olympus on your
carriage-wheels. Mr. Lowell, helping himself to the words, says, "It's
a pleasure to have been at college;" for college in its first meaning
is a _collection_ of men, as in the phrase "The college of
cardinals."]

Nearer art thou than simply native earth,
My du