How often from this windy upland perch,

Mine eyes have seen the forest break in bloom,

The rose-red maple and the golden birch,

The dusty yellow of the elms, the gloom

Of the tall poplar hung with tasseled black;

Ah, I have watched, till eye and ear and brain

Grew full of dreams as they, the moted plain,

The sun-steeped wood, the marsh-land at its back,

The valley where the river wheels and fills,

Yon city glimmering in its smoky shroud,

And out at the last misty rim the hills

Blue and far off and mounded like a cloud,

And here the noisy rutted road that goes

Down the slope yonder, flanked on either side

With the smooth-furrowed fields flung black and wide,

Patched with pale water sleeping in the rows.

So as I watched the crowded leaves expand,

The bloom break sheath, the summer's strength uprear,

In earth's great mother's heart already planned

The heaped and burgeoned plenty of the year,

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