es.
Oh, might I leap into the raging flood
And urge on the pack to harry

The hidden glades of the coral wood,
For the walrus, a worthy quarry!
From yonder mast a flag streams out
As bold as a royal pennant;
I can watch the good ship lunge about
From this tower of which I am tenant;
But oh, might I be in the battling ship,
Might I seize the rudder and steer her,
How gay o'er the foaming reef we'd slip
Like the sea-gulls circling near her!

Were I a hunter wandering free,
Or a soldier in some sort of fashion,
Or if I at least a man might be,
The heav'ns would grant me my passion.

But now I must sit as fine and still
As a child in its best of dresses,
And only in secret may have my will
And give to the wind my tresses.

* * * * *

THE DESOLATE HOUSE[38] (1842)

Deep in a dell a woodsman's house
Has sunk in wild dilapidation;
There buried under vines and boughs
I often sit in contemplation.
So dense the tangle that the day
Through heavy lashes can but glimmer;
The rocky cleft is rendered dimmer
By overshadowing tree-trunks gray.

Within that dell I love to hear
The flies with their tumultuous humming,
And solitary beetles near
Amid the bushes softly drumming.

And when the trickling cliffs of slate
The color from the sunset borrow,
Methinks an eye all red with sorrow
Looks down on me disconsolate.

The arbor peak with jagged edge
Wears many a vine-shoot long and meagre
And from the moss beneath the hedge
Creep forth carnations, nowise eager.
There from the moist cliff overhead
The muddy drippings oft bedew them,
Then creep in lazy streamlets through them
To sink within a fennel-bed.

Along the roof o'ergrown with moss
Has many a tuft of thatch projected,
A spider-web is built across
The window-jamb, else unprotected;
The wing of a gleaming dragon-fly
Hangs in it like some petal tender,
The body armed in golden splendor
Lies headless on the sill near-by.

A butterfly sometimes may chance
In heedless play to flutter hither
And stop in momentary trance
Where the narcissus blossoms wither;
A dove that through the grove has flown
Above this dell no more will utter
Her coo, one can but hear her flutter
And see her shadow on the stone.

And in the fireplace where the snow
Eac