"But, as tenderly before him, the lorn Ximena knelt, She saw the Northern eagle shining on his pistol belt." Page 810.

"Beams of noon like burning lances, through the tree-tops flash

and glisten,

As she stands before her lover, with raised face to look and

listen."

Page 885.

THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM.

Page 239.

ENGRAVED BY A. C. WARREN.

Each Moslem, Tomb, and Cypress old,
Looked holy through the sunset air.

THE BRIDAL OF PENNACOOK.*

We had seen

We had been wandering for many days
Through the rough northern country.
The sunset, with its bars of purple cloud,
Like a new heaven, shine upward from the lake
Of Winnepiseogee; and had felt

The sunrise breezes, midst the leafy isles

Which stoop their summer beauty to the lips

Of the bright waters. We had checked our steeds,
Silent with wonder, where the mountain wall

Is piled to heaven; and, through the narrow rift
Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet
Beats the mad torrent with perpetual roar,
Where noonday is as twilight, and the wind
Comes burdened with the everlasting moan
Of forests and of far-off water-falls,

We had looked upward where the summer sky,
Tasseled with clouds light-woven by the sun,

*Winnepurkit, otherwise called George, Sachem of Saugus, married a daughter of Passaconaway, the great Pennacook chieftain, in 1662. The wedding took place at Pennacook (now Concord, N. H.), and the ceremonies closed with a great feast. According to the usages of the chiefs, Passaconaway ordered a select number of his men to accompany the newly-married couple to the dwelling of the husband, where in turn there was another great feast. Some time after, the wife of Winnepurkit expressing a desire to visit her father's house, was permitted to go accompanied by a brave escort of her husband's chief men. But when she wished to return, her father sent a messenger to Saugus, informing her husband, and asking him to come and take her away. He returned for answer that he had escorted his wife to her father's house in a style that became a chief, and that now if she wished to return, her father must send her back in the same way. This Passaconaway refused to do, and it is said that here terminated the connection of his daughter with the Saugus chief. Vide Morton's New Canaan.

Sprung its blue arch above the abutting crags
O'er-roofing the vast portal of the land
Beyond the wall of mountains. We had passed
The high source of the Saco; and, bewildered
In the dwarf spruce-belts of the Crystal Hills
Had heard above us, like a voice in the cloud,
The horn of Fabyan sounding; and atop
Of old Agioochook had seen the mountains

Piled to the northward, shagged with wood, and thick
As meadow mole hills the far sea of Casco,

-

A white gleam on the horizon of the east;
Fair lakes, embosomed in the woods and hills;
Moosehillock's mountain range, and Kearsarge
Lifting his Titan forehead to the sun!

And we had rested underneath the oaks

Shadowing the bank, whose grassy spires are shaken By the perpetual beating of the falls

Of the wild Ammonoosuc. We had tracked

The winding Pemigewasset, overhung

By beechen shadows, whitening down its rocks,
Or lazily gliding through its intervals,
From waving rye-fields sending up the gleam
Of sunlit waters. We had seen the moon
Rising behind Umbagog's eastern pines
Like a great Indian camp-fire; and its beams
At midnight spanning with a bridge of silver
The Merrimac by Uncanoonuc's falls.

There were five souls of us whom travel's chance
Had thrown together in these wild north hills:-
:-
A city lawyer, for a month escaping

From his dull office, where the weary eye

Saw only hot brick walls and close thronged streets
Briefless as yet, but with an eye to see

Life's sunniest side, and with a heart to take
Its chances all as God-sends; and his brother,
Pale from long pulpit studies, yet retaining
The warmth and freshness of a genial heart,

Whose mirror of the beautiful and true,
In Man and Nature, was as yet undimmed
By dust of theologic strife, or breath
Of sect, or cobwebs of scholastic lore;
Like a clear crystal calm of water, taking
The hue and image of o'erleaning flowers,
Sweet human faces, white clouds of the noon,
Slant starlight glimpses through the dewy leaves,
And tenderest moonrise. 'Twas, in truth, a study,
To mark his spirit, alternating between

A decent and professional gravity

And an irreverent mirthfulness, which often
Laughed in the face of his divinity,

Plucked off the sacred ephod, quite unshrined
The oracle, and for the pattern priest

Left us the man. A shrewd, sagacious merchant,

To whom the soiled sheet found in Crawford's inn,
Giving the latest news of city stocks

And sales of cotton had a deeper meaning
Than the great presence of the awful mountains
Glorified by the sunset; and his daughter,
A delicate flower on whom had blown too long
Those evil winds, which, sweeping from the ice
And winnowing the fogs of Labrador,

Shed their cold blight round Massachusetts' bay,

With the same breath which stirs Spring's opening leaves And lifts her half-formed flower-bell on its stem,

Poisoning our sea-side atmosphere.

It chanced

That as we turned upon our homeward way,
A drear north-eastern storm came howling up
The valley of the Saco; and that girl
Who had stood with us upon Mount Washington,
Her brown locks ruffled by the wind which whirled
In gusts around its sharp cold pinnacle,
Who had joined our gay trout-fishing in the streams
Which lave that giant's feet; whose laugh was heard
Like a bird's carol on the sunrise breeze