Flowers In Winter

Painted Upon a Porte Livre.     How strange to greet, this frosty morn,     In graceful counterfeit of flowers,     These children of the meadows, born     Of sunshine and of showers!     How well the conscious wood retains     The pictures of its flower-sown home,     The lights and shades, the purple stains,     And golden hues of bloom!     It was a happy thought to bring     To the dark seasons frost and rime     This painted memory of spring,     This dream of summer-time.     Our hearts are lighter for its sake,     Our fancys age renews its youth,     And dim-remembered fictions take     The guise of, present truth.     A wizard of the Merrimac,     So old ancestral legends say,     Could call green leaf and blossom back     To frosted stem and spray.     The dry logs of the cottage wall,     Beneath his touch, put out their leaves     The clay-bound swallow, at his call,     Played round the icy eaves.     The settler saw his oaken flail     Take bud, and bloom before his eyes;     From frozen pools he saw the pale,     Sweet summer lilies rise.     To their old homes, by man profaned,     Came the sad dryads, exiled long,     And through their leafy tongues complained     Of household use and wrong.     The beechen platter sprouted wild,     The pipkin wore its old-time green     The cradle oer the sleeping child     Became a leafy screen.     Haply our gentle friend hath met,     While wandering in her sylvan quest,     Haunting his native woodlands yet,     That Druid of the West;     And, while the dew on leaf and flower     Glistened in moonlight clear and still,     Learned the dusk wizards spell of power,     And caught his trick of skill.     But welcome, be it new or old,     The gift which makes the day more bright,     And paints, upon the ground of cold     And darkness, warmth and light.     Without is neither gold nor green;     Within, for birds, the birch-logs sing;     Yet, summer-like, we sit between     The autumn and the spring.     The one, with bridal blush of rose,     And sweetest breath of woodland balm,     And one whose matron lips unclose     In smiles of saintly calm.     Fill soft and deep, O winter snow!     The sweet azaleas oaken dells,     And hide the bank where roses blow,     And swing the azure bells!     Oerlay the amber violets leaves,     The purple asters brookside home,     Guard all the flowers her pencil gives     A life beyond their bloom.     And she, when spring comes round again,     By greening slope and singing flood     Shall wander, seeking, not in vain,     Her darlings of the wood.