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| O THOU of home the guardian Lar, | |
| And, when our earth hath wandered far | |
| Into the cold, and deep snow covers | |
| The walks of our New England lovers, | |
| Their sweet secluded evening-star! | 5 |
| ’T was with thy rays the English Muse | |
| Ripened her mild domestic hues; | |
| ’T was by thy flicker that she conned | |
| The fireside wisdom that enrings | |
| With light from heaven familiar things; | 10 |
| By thee she found the homely faith | |
| In whose mild eyes thy comfort stay’th, | |
| When Death, extinguishing his torch, | |
| Gropes for the latch-string in the porch; | |
| The love that wanders not beyond | 15 |
| His earliest nest, but sits and sings | |
| While children smooth his patient wings: | |
| Therefore with thee I love to read | |
| Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs | |
| Life in the withered words! how swift recede | 20 |
| Time’s shadows! and how glows again | |
| Through its dead mass the incandescent verse, | |
| As when upon the anvils of the brain | |
| It glittering lay, cyclopically wrought | |
| By the fast-throbbing hammers of the poet’s thought! | 25 |
| Thou murmurest, too, divinely stirred, | |
| The aspirations unattained, | |
| The rhythms so rathe and delicate, | |
| They bent and strained | |
| And broke, beneath the sombre weight | 30 |
| Of any airiest mortal word. | |
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| What warm protection dost thou bend | |
| Round curtained talk of friend with friend, | |
| While the gray snow-storm, held aloof, | |
| To softest outline rounds the roof, | 35 |
| Or the rude North with baffled strain | |
| Shoulders the frost-starred window-pane! | |
| Now the kind nymph to Bacchus borne | |
| By Morpheus’ daughter, she that seems | |
| Gifted upon her natal morn | 40 |
| By him with fire, by her with dreams, | |
| Nicotia, dearer to the Muse | |
| Than all the grapes’ bewildering juice, | |
| We worship, unforbid of thee; | |
| And, as her incense floats and curls | 45 |
| In airy spires and wayward whirls, | |
| Or poises on its tremulous stalk | |
| A flower of frailest revery, | |
| So winds and loiters, idly free, | |
| The current of unguided talk, | 50 |
| Now laughter-rippled, and now caught | |
| In smooth dark pools of deeper thought. | |
| Meanwhile thou mellowest every word, | |
| A sweetly unobtrusive third; | |
| For thou hast magic beyond wine, | 55 |
| To unlock natures each to each; | |
| The unspoken thought thou canst divine: | |
| Thou fill’st the pauses of the speech | |
| With whispers that to dream-land reach, | |
| And frozen fancy-springs unchain, | 60 |
| In Arctic outskirts of the brain; | |
| Sun of all inmost confidences, | |
| To thy rays doth the heart unclose | |
| Its formal calyx of pretences, | |
| That close against rude day’s offences, | 65 |
| And open its shy midnight rose! * * * * * | |
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