NEW-HAMPSHIRE.    603

NEW-HAMPSHIRE.

EDNA DEAN PROCTOR.

“ A goodly realm!” said Captain Smith,

Scanning the coast by the Isles of Shoals,

While the wind blew fair, as in Indian myth
Blows the breeze from the Land of Souls;

Blew from the marshes of Hampton spread
Level and green that summer day,

And over the brow of Great Boar’s Head,

From the pines that stretched to the west away;

And sunset died on the rippling sea,

Ere to the south, with the wind, sailed he.

But he told the story in London streets,

And again to court and Prince and king.

“A truce,” men cried “to Virginia heats;

The north is the land of hope and spring!”

And in sixteen hundred and twenty-three,

For Dover meadows and Portsmouth river,

Bold and earnest they crossed the sea,

And the realm was theirs and ours forever!

Up from the floods of Piscataqua,

Slowly, slowly they made their Way *

Back to the Merrimack’s eager tide,

Poured through its meadows rich and wide;

And the river that runs like a joyous brook—

Monadnock’s darling, the Contoocook;—

And westward turned for the warmer gales
And the wealth of Connecticut’s intervales;

And to Winnipesaukee’s tranquil sea,

Bosomed in hills and bright with isles
Where the alder grows and the dark pine tree,

And the tired wind sleeps and the sunlight smiles;

Up and on to the mountains piled,

Peak o’er peak, in the northern air,

Home of streams and of winds that wild
Torrent and tempest vale-ward bear,—

Where the Great Stone Face looms changeless, calm
As the Sphinx that couches on Egypt’s sands,

And the fir and the sassafras yield their balm
Sweet as the odors of Morning lands.—

Where the eagle floats in the summer noon,

While his comrade clouds drift, silent, by,

And the waters fill with a mystic tune
The fane the clifts have built to the sky!

And, beyond, to the woods where the huge moose browsed.
And the dun deer drank at the rill unroused