Reggler People Play In Casco Bay

NOWHERE fairer, sweeter, rarer,   
Does the golden-looked fruit-bearer   
  Through his painted woodlands stray,   
Than where hillside oaks and beeches   
Overlook the long, blue reaches,           
Silver coves and pebbled beaches,   
  And green isles of Casco Bay;   
  Nowhere day, for delay,   
With a tenderer look beseeches,   
  “Let me with my charmed earth stay.”           

On the grainlands of the mainlands   
Stands the serried corn like train-bands,   
  Plume and pennon rustling gay;   
Out at sea, the islands wooded,   
Silver birches, golden-hooded,           
Set with maples, crimson-blooded,   
  White sea-foam and sand-hills gray,   
  Stretch away, far away.   
Dim and dreamy, over-brooded   
  By the hazy autumn day.           

Gayly chattering to the clattering   
Of the brown nuts downward pattering,   
  Leap the squirrels, red and gray.   
On the grass-land, on the fallow,   
Drop the apples, red and yellow;           
Drop the russet pears and mellow,   
  Drop the red leaves all the day,   
  And away, swift away,   
Sun and cloud, o’er hill and hollow   
  Chasing, weave their web of play. 

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)