Intense upon his heedless head Frowns Agamenticus, Knowing of Heaven’s challenger The answer: even thus The Patience that is hid on high Doth stoop to master us.
Full light are all his parting dreams; Desire is in his brain; He tightens at the tavern-post The fiery creature’s rein: “Now eat thine apple, six years’ child! We face for home again.”
They had not gone a many mile With nimble heart and tongue, When the lone thrush grew silent The walnut woods among; And on the lulled horizon A premonition hung.
The babes at Hampton schoolhouse, The wife with lads at sea, Search with a level-lifted hand The distance bodingly; And farmer folk bid pilgrims in Under a safe roof-tree.
The mowers mark by Newbury How low the swallows fly, They glance across the southern roads All white and fever-dry, And the river, anxious at the bend, Beneath a thinking sky.
But there is one abroad was born To disbelieve and dare: Along the highway furiously He cuts the purple air. The wind leaps on the startled world As hounds upon a hare;
With brawl and glare and shudder ope The sluices of the storm; The woods break down, the sand upblows In blinding volleys warm; The yellow floods in frantic surge Familiar fields deform.
From evening until morning His skill will not avail, And as he cheers his youngest born, His cheek is spectre-pale; For the bonnie mare from courses known Has drifted like a sail!
On some wild crag he sees the dawn Unsheathe her scimitar. “Oh, if it be my mother-earth, And not a foreign star, Tell me the way to Boston, And is it near or far?”
One watchman lifts his lamp and laughs: “Ye’ve many a league to wend.” The next doth bless the sleeping boy From his mad father’s end; A third upon a drawbridge growls: “Bear ye to larboard, friend.”
Forward and backward, like a stone The tides have in their hold, He dashes east, and then distraught Darts west as he is told, (Peter Rugg the Bostonian, That knew the land of old!)
And journeying, and resting scarce A melancholy space, Turns to and fro, and round and round, The frenzy in his face, And ends alway in angrier mood, And in a stranger place,
Lost! lost in bayberry thickets Where Plymouth plovers run, And where the masts of Salem Look lordly in the sun; Lost in the Concord vale, and lost By rocky Wollaston!