North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,

Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,

Or whipping its rough surface for a trout;

Or bathers, diving from the rock at noon;

Challenging Echo by our guns and cries;

Or listening to the laughter of the loon;

Or, in the evening twilight’s latest red,

Beholding the procession of the pines;

Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,

In the boat’s bows, a silent night-hunter

Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds

Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist.

Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods

Is fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck

Who stands astonished at the meteor light,

Then turns to bound away, – is it too late?

Sometimes we tried our rifles at a mark,

Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;

Sometimes our wits at sally and retort,

With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle;

Or parties scaled the near acclivities

Competing seekers of a rumored lake,

Whose unauthenticated waves we named

Lake Probability, – our carbuncle,

Long sought, not found.

Two Doctors in the camp

Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout’s brain,

Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,

Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow, and moth;

Insatiate skill in water or in air

Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;

The while, one leaden pot of alcohol

Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.

Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants,

Orchis and gentian, fern, and long whip-scirpus,

Rosy polygonum, lake-margin’s pride,

Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge, and moss,

Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.

Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,

The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker

Loud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.

As water poured through hollows of the hills

To feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,

So Nature shed all beauty lavishly

From her redundant horn.

Lords of this realm,

Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day

Rounded by hours where each outdid the last

In miracles of pomp, we must be proud,

As if associates of the sylvan gods.

We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,

So pure the Alpine element we breathed,

So light, so lofty pictures came and went.

We trode on air, contemned the distant town,

Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned

That we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge,

And how we should come hither with our sons,

Hereafter, – willing they, and more adroit.

Hard fare, hard bed, and comic misery, –

The midge, the blue-fly, and the mosquito

Painted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:

But, on the second day, we heed them not,

Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,

Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.

For who defends our leafy tabernacle

From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd, –

Who but the midge, mosquito, and the fly,

Which past endurance sting the tender cit,

But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,

Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?