s
When Bacchus bredes his curling hair
With vine-leaves, and from ev'ry lair
Voluptuous Maenads lovely calls.
They come, they come, a happy throng,
The berriers with gibe and song;
Deep pails brimmed black to tin-white eaves
With luscious fruit kept cool with leaves
Of aromatic sassafras,
'Twixt which some sparkling berry slips,
Like laughter, from the purple mass,
Wine swollen as Silenus' lips.
HARVESTING.
I.
NOON.
The tanned and sultry noon climbs high
Up gleaming reaches of the sky;
Below the balmy belts of pines
The cliff-lunged river laps and shines;
Adown the aromatic dell
Sifts the warm harvest's musky smell.
And, oh! above one sees and hears
The brawny-throated harvesters;
Their red brows beaded with the heat,
By twos and threes among the wheat
Flash their hot sickles' slenderness
In loops of shine; and sing, and sing,
Like some mad troop of piping Pan,
Along the hills that swoon or ring
With sounds of Ariel airiness
That haunted freckled Caliban:
"O ho! O ho! 'tis noon, I say;
The roses blow.
Away, away, above the hay
The burly bees to the roses gay
Hum love-tunes all the livelong day,
So low! so low!
The roses' Minnesingers they."
II.
TWILIGHT.
Up velvet lawns of lilac skies
The tawny moon begins to rise
Behind low blue-black hills of trees,
As rises from faint Siren seas,
To rock in purple deeps, hip-hid,
A virgin-bosom'd Oceanid.
Gaunt shadows crouch by rock and wood,
Like hairy Satyrs, grim and rude,
Till the white Dryads of the moon
Come noiseless in their silver shoon
To beautify them with their love.
The sweet, sad notes I hear, I hear,
Beyond dim pines and mellow hills,
Of some fair maiden harvester,
The lovely Limnad of the grove
Whose singing charms me while it kills:
"O deep! O deep! the twilight rare
Pales on to sleep;
And fair, so fair! fades the rich air.
The fountain shines in its ferny lair,
Where the cold Nymph sits in her oozy hair
To weep, to weep,
For a mortal youth who is not there."
GOING FOR THE COWS.
I.
The juice-big apples' sullen gold,
Like lazy Sultans laughed and lolled
'Mid heavy mats of leaves that lay
Green-flatten'd 'gainst the glaring
|