So Philemon and Baucis took up their residence in the marble palace, and spent their time in making everybody happy and comfortable who happened to pass that way. They lived in their palace a very great while, and grew older and older, and very old indeed. At length, however, there came a summer morning when Philemon and Baucis failed to make their appearance, as on other mornings. The guests searched everywhere, but all to no purpose. At last they espied in front of the door, two venerable trees, which no one had ever seen there before. One was an oak and the other a linden tree.
While the guests were marvelling how these trees could have come to be so tall in a single night, a breeze sprang up and set their boughs astir. Then there was a deep murmur in the air, as if the two trees were speaking.
“I am Philemon!” murmured the oak.
“I am Baucis!” murmured the linden tree.
And oh, what a hospitable shade did they fling around them! Whenever a wayfarer paused beneath it, he heard a whisper of the leaves above his head, and wondered how the sound could so much resemble words like these,—
“Welcome, welcome, dear traveller, welcome!”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne.
THE UNNAMED LAKE
It sleeps among the thousand hills
Where no man ever trod,
And only Nature’s music fills
The silences of God.
Great mountains tower above its shore,
Green rushes fringe its brim,
And o’er its breast forevermore
The wanton breezes skim.