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,
250And when the westering sun half sunken burns,
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
255(Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew),
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.
260Yes, dearer for thy dust than all that e'er,
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]
265That here what colleging was mine I had,—
It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!
[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 dust with thine concedes a deeper tie;
A closer claim thy soil may well put forth,
270Something of kindred more than sympathy;
For in thy bounds I reverently laid away
That blinding anguish of forsaken clay,
That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,
That portion of my life more choice to me
275(Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole)[16]
Than all the imperfect residue can be;—
The Artist saw his statue of the soul
Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke,
279The earthen model into fragments broke,
And without her the impoverished seasons roll.