A subtle charm, an instinct fine
Allures the saunterer, fancy-led,--
Escaped the city’s starling red,--
To winding wood-paths, tracked of old
Along the levels dark with pine
Whose fallen needles of tawny gold,
Shade-frockled in the warm sunshine,
Muffle the oxen’s heavy tread,
While all their green-gray, overhead,
Or yonder on the hills of oak,
The dusky ruts creep in and out
Round mossy cliff or tree-trunk stout,
A moment lost, a moment seen,
Where under wheels the worn rooks smoke,
And trampled tufts of pallid green
Fringe the twin trail the oxen broke:
Long, tangled vines are coiled about
The arching boughs, and drooping, flout
The woodman on his wain below their leafy screen.
They are not planned by human skill,
But even as the water-course
That seaward wanders from its source,
They wind their devious way as led
By Nature’s own unconscious will;
Now stooping to the runnel’s bed,
Now wooing the reluctant hill.
The wild accepts them, as perforce
They bond to rock and cataract hoarse,
And become kin to all the rudeness tound them spread.
Clear, in a glade, the sallow grass
Shines, gilded by the affluent sun,
Through it the broken traces run
Of the lone path that seeks the dell,
Here crowded to a narrow pass,
There climbing o'er the ferny swell,
Elbowed by birch and sassafras,
Anon descending to the dun
Cool hemlock gloaming, as to shun
The searching light of heaven in bowers where fairies dwell.
Come where the lonelier way invites
To more mysterious deeps of shade,
Here shyest things are not afraid;
The cat-bird trills his mocking lays,
And the brown rabbit sits and bites
The honeyed clover, gaily plays
The squirrel his fantastic sleights,
Curious, perchance, but undismayed,
For only lovers seek this glade,—
Poet and bird and beast, whatever hither strays.
Pleased If a little brook may wind
Beside the wood-path and across
Old fallen trunks with golden moss,
And twitter Ike the thrushes there!
While in, and o’er its bed we find
The water-cress and maiden’s-hair—
Bow freshly tall on heart and mind
The dews the mimic cascades toss.
And all the charms, secure from loss,
That throng the lone wood-walks in June's mellifluous air!
Wood-Paths