The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 4.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

[231]
     The din about him could not drown
What the strange voices whispered down;
     Along his task-field weird processions swept,
The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped

The common air was thick with dreams,—
     He told them to the toiling crowd;
Such music as the woods and streams
     Sang in his ear he sang aloud;
In still, shut bays, on windy capes,
     He heard the call of beckoning shapes,
And, as the gray old shadows prompted him,
     To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.

He rested now his weary hands,
     And lightly moralized and laughed,
As, tracing on the shifting sands
     A burlesque of his paper-craft,
He saw the careless waves o'errun
     His words, as time before had done,
Each day's tide-water washing clean away,
     Like letters from the sand, the work of yesterday.

And one, whose Arab face was tanned
     By tropic sun and boreal frost,
So travelled there was scarce a land
     Or people left him to exhaust,
In idling mood had from him hurled
     The poor squeezed orange of the world,
And in the tent-shade, as beneath a palm,
     Smoked, cross-legged like a Turk, in Oriental calm.