Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed,
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And close at hand the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood.
* * * *
John Greenleaf Whittier.
Highland Cattle
Down the wintry mountain
Like a cloud they come,
Not like a cloud in its silent shroud
When the sky is leaden and the earth all dumb,
But tramp, tramp, tramp,
With a roar and a shock,
And stamp, stamp, stamp,
Down the hard granite rock,
With the snow-flakes falling fair
Like an army in the air
Of white-winged angels leaving
Their heavenly homes, half grieving,
And half glad to drop down kindly upon earth so bare:
With a snort and a bellow
Tossing manes dun and yellow,
Red and roan, black and gray,
In their fierce merry play,
Though the sky is all leaden and the earth all dumb—
Down the noisy cattle come!
Throned on the mountain
Winter sits at ease:
Hidden under mist are those peaks of amethyst
That rose like hills of heaven above the amber seas.
While crash, crash, crash,
Through the frozen heather brown,
And dash, dash, dash,
Where the ptarmigan drops down
And the curlew stops her cry
And the deer sinks, like to die—
And the waterfall's loud noise
Is the only living voice—
With a plunge and a roar
Like mad waves upon the shore,
Or the wind through the pass
Howling o'er the reedy grass—
In a wild battalion pouring from the heights unto the plain,
Down the cattle come again!
* * * *
Dinah Maria Mulock.
A Scene in Paradise
Adam the goodliest man of men since born
His sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve.
Under a tuft of shade that on a green
Stood whispering soft, by a fresh fountain-side,
They sat them down;...
... About them frisking played
All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase
In wood or wilderness, forest or den.
Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw
Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,
Gamboled before them; the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis; close the serpent sly,
Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine
His braided train, and of his fatal guile
Gave proof unheeded. Others on the grass
Couched, and, now filled with pasture, gazing sat,
Or bedward ruminating; for the sun,
Declined, was hastening now with prone career
To the Ocean Isles, and in the ascending scale
Of Heaven the stars that usher evening rose.