Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
Northampton
By Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1813–1871)E
O fairest village of the plain!
The thoughts that here to life have started
Draw me to Nature’s heart again.
Far o’er the level meadow grows,
And through it, like a wayward rover,
The noble river gently flows.
By all the storms an age can bring,
Trail sprays whose rest the zephyrs waken,
Yet lithesome with the juice of spring.
Each green leaf shows its white below,
As foam on emerald waves is drifted,
Their tints alternate come and go.
And when the distant mountain ranges
In moonlight or blue mist are clad,
Oft memory all the landscape changes,
And pensive thoughts are blent with glad.
Val d’Arno’s fair and loved domain
Seems, to my rapt yet waking vision,
To yield familiar charms again.
Amid the central valley lies
A white church-spire unknown to story,
And smoke-wreaths from a cottage rise.
No line of cypresses we see,
Nor convent old with beauty crowning
The heights of sweet Fiesole.