Classic Poem

The night is cold, the heavens are fair,
The barns are rich with ripened sheaves;
And beggared orchards, brown and bare,
Are drifted with autumnal leaves.

With festive rounds of social mirth,
Within, the season we defy,
While on the broad, old fashioned hearth,
The seasoned hickory blazes high.

The tale is told, the poem read,
The double joke improved to death,
Till dew-eyed Pity droops her head,
Or broad-mouthed Laughter pants for breath!

Nor less his joy whose mood may choose,
Apart from all the social rout,
In quiet window nooks to muse
Upon the frozen world without.

How fair the frosty pastures lie!
And sparkling keen with early snows,
How grand against the dark blue sky,
The highlands lift their shaggy brows!

The fountain, frozen in the air,
Hath lost its pleasant, summer tune;
And all its marble Tritons glare
Through icy visors, at the moon!

Swift as the eagle from the wood,
Far circling, swoops upon the fold,
The skater skims the solid flood,
Red-cheeked, and muffled from the cold.

Summer is dead upon the heath,
And folded in her winding-sheet,
And fitful gusts above her breathe
Æolian dirges, lorn and sweet;

And ruder blasts, responsive, moan
Through hollow dells and woodlands hoar,
Whose hoarse and ever changing tone,
Delights the ear of Fancy more.

For as a captive lark who hears
Her mates their matin-songs renew,
While she alone of countless choirs—
Imprisioned from her native blue,

Awakes the house with plaintive cries
Of longing, or assails the grate
With desperate wings, and vainly tries
To conquer her contentless fate—

So there are moments when the soul
Rustles her plumes and longs for flight.
And brooks with pain her brief control;
And listening to those winds to-night,

I seem to mount and ride the gale,
With Boreas in his battle-car,
Through blinding snows and battering hail,
To realms beneath the Polar star;

Where Winter, muffled to the eyes,
Doth watch his weird suns wax and wane,
And locked in ribs of eldest ice,
Maintains his lone, primeval reign.

Times go by turns: I will not mourn
In that it is not always May;
But in the arms of Fancy borne,
Slide easily from day to day,

Watch Nature in her various state,
Fix wings of mirth to languid hours,
Stir up the fires of home, and wait
With large content, the birds and flowers;

Nor envy him his darkened ways,
Who may not love the frost and snow,
Or in the hale December days,
To hear the wind's wild trumpets blow!