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The spring-time is here with gleam and glow,
And softer the vernal breezes blow,
The pallid ice-field extends no more
O’er the broad river-reach its crystal floor;
All the open bay is breezy and white,
All its dancing billows quiver with light.
Then come, then come, brethren of gun and rod,
When earliest violets sow the sod,
For the brooks are alive with springing trout ---
Alive with wilful and wanton rout.
O come, then, brothers of the rod and gun,
Where the wild-fowl gather and waters run.
Behold, by the Bay-shore’s sedgy banks
The wild-geese squadrons deploy their ranks;
In wedge-like columns, in crowded files,
They swoop o’er the bay, over spreading bay,
On clanging pinions they urge their way;
Now high over sailing clouds they pass,
Now prone they stoop to the yellow grass,
Till with follow honkings they settle low,
And fold their wings where the currents flow.
Then haste, then, brothers that love the gun,
Where the brant-flocks gather at peep of sun;
Ere the first light crimsons the rolling deep,
The dark flocks shoreward circling sweep;
They wheel by jutting headland and cape,
For the feeding-shallows their way they shape,
And the fowler, hid by the weedy shore,
Thins out their ranks as they hover o’er.
Soon will a tenderer glow suffuse
The drifting clouds with rosier hues;
Over upland pasture and woody steep;
Soon will the glory of summer pervade
The ocean-border, the forest shade;
And the angler his precious spoil may take ---
The salmon, the trout --- by shore and lake;
And when the colors autumnal shall stain
The sumptuous foliage of wood and plain,
The smokes of the frequent gun shall arise
Where in stubble-fields the covey lies,
Or where in the dusky forest the deer
Urge far and fleetly their grand career.
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