And the shrill hammers on the anvil beat
The iron white with heat!

And thus, dear children, have ye made for me
This day a jubilee,

And to my more than threescore years and ten
Brought back my youth again.

The heart hath its own memory, like the mind,
And in it are enshrined

The precious keepsakes, into which is wrought
The giver's loving thought.

Only your love and your remembrance could
Give life to this dead wood,

And make these branches, leafless now so long,
Blossom again in song.1

SONG.

STAY, stay at home, my heart, and rest;
Home-keeping hearts are happiest,

For those that wander they know not where
Are full of trouble and full of care;
To stay at home is best.

Weary and homesick and distressed,
They wander east, they wander west,

Contributions for the purchase of the chair came from some seven hundred children of the public schools. Mr. Longfellow had this poem, which he wrote on the day the chair was given him, printed on a sheet, and was accustomed to give a copy to each child who visited him and sat in the chair.

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS.

And are baffled and beaten and blown about
By the winds of the wilderness of doubt:

To stay at home is best.

Then stay at home, my heart, and rest;
The bird is safest in its nest;

O'er all that flutter their wings and fly
A hawk is hovering in the sky;
To stay at home is best.

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS.

It was the schooner Hesperus,

That sailed the wintry sea;

And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,

And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailòr,

Had sailed to the Spanish Main,

"I pray thee, put into yonder port, For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring, And to-night no moon we see!"

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The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,

And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr, And do not tremble so;

For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;

He cut a rope from a broken spar,

And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
Oh say, what may it be?"
""Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!
And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns, Oh say, what may it be?"

"Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!"

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"O father! I see a gleaming light, Oh say, what may it be?"

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS.

57

But the father answered never a word,

A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be ;

And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,

And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,

But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;

Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,

To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;

And he saw her hair, like the brown seaweed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!

Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!1

THE BELLS OF LYNN.

HEARD AT NAHANT.2

O CURFEW of the setting sun! O Bells of Lynn !
O requiem of the dying day! O Bells of Lynn!

From the dark belfries of yon cloud-cathedral wafted, Your sounds aerial seem to float, O Bells of Lynn!

It was the loss of a real schooner Hesperus, off the reef of Norman's Woe, near Gloucester, Massachusetts, which suggested this ballad to the poet.

2 Nahant, a promontory running out from Lynn beach, was long a summer home of Mr. Longfellow. Though there is no rhyme, the steady recurrence of the phrase, “O Bells of Lynn," gives both rhythmic swing and the effect of rhyme.