Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
At Home in Staten Island
By Charles Mackay (1814–1889)M
And from our garden alley,
Looked o’er the landscape seamed with sea,
And rich with hill and valley,
And said, “We ’ve found a pleasant place
As fair as thine and my land,
A calm abode, a flowery home,
In sunny Staten Island.
With lust of gold grown frantic;
Before us glitters o’er the bay
The peaceable Atlantic.
We hear the murmur of the sea,—
A monotone of sadness,
But not a whisper of the crowd,
Or echo of its madness.
Through all the greenwood mazes,
As white as the untrodden snow
That hides in shady places.
See how the fair catalpa spreads
Its azure flowers in masses,
Bell-shaped, as if to woo the wind
To ring them as it passes.
The haunt of cooing turtle,
The clambering vine, the branching elm,
The maple and the myrtle,
The undergrowth of flowers and fern
In many-tinted lustre,
And parasites that climb or creep,
And droop, and twist, and cluster.
That in the sunshine glitter,
The bluebird, oriole, and wren
That dart and float and twitter;
And humming-birds that peer like bees
In stamen and in pistil,
And, over all, the bright blue sky
Translucent as a crystal.
And all the landscape sunny
Seems, like the Hebrew Paradise,
To flow with milk and honey.
Here let us rest, a little while,—
Not rich enough to buy land,
And pass a summer well content
In bowery Staten Island.”