From kettle to kettle he ladles it to granulate rich and slow,
Then fashions the mass in a hundred shapes, congealing them in the snow,
While the blue-bird strikes a sudden joy through the branches gaunt and dumb,
As he seems to ask in his merry strain if the violet yet has come.
The rich, dark maple sugar! thus it brings to me the joy,
The dear warm joy of my heart, when I was a careless, happy boy;
When pleasures so scorned in after life, like flowers, then strewed my way,
And no dark sad experience breathed “doomed sufferer be not gay!”
When Life like a summer ocean spread before me with golden glow,
And soft with the azure of Hope, but concealing the wrecks that lay below.