I awake from night's alarms
In the bliss of living arms;
Melted goes my leaden dream
Down the warmth of this Gulf-Stream.
'Tis the trade-wind of my soul,
Wafting life to make it whole:
All the night it joyward blew,
Though I neither hoped nor knew.
Fresher blow me out to sea,
Morning-tost I fain would be,
Sweep my deck and pile it high
With the ingots of the sky.
Give me freight to carry round
To a place with night that's drowned,
That the Gulf-Stream of the day
Glitter then my Milky-Way.
WET-WEATHER WORK.
BY A FARMER.
II.
Snowing: the checkered fields below are traceable now only by the brown lines of fences and the sparse trees that mark the hedge-rows. The white of the houses and of the spires of the town is seen dimly through the snow, and seems to waver and shift position like the sails and spars of ships seen through fog. And straightway upon this image of ships and swaying spars I go sailing back to the farm-land of the past, and sharpen my pen for another day's work among The Old Farm-Writers.
I suspect Virgil was never a serious farmer. I am confident he never had one of those callosities upon the inner side of his right thumb which come of the lower thole of a scythe-snath, after a week's mowing. But he had that quick poet's eye which sees at a glance what other men see only in a day. Not a shrub or a tree, not a bit of fallow ground or of nodding lentils escaped his observation; not a bird or a bee; not even the mosquitoes, which to this day hover pestiferously about the low-lying sedge-lands of Mantua. His first pastoral, little known now, and rarely printed with his works, is inscribed Culex.[13]