THE OLD VILLAGE.
IT lies among the greenest hills
New England’s depths can show;
About their base the river fills
And empties as the distant mills
Control its ebb and flow:
It had a quick life of its own,
But that was long ago.
Two centuries have rolled away
Since a small, hardy band
Turned their sad faces from the bay,
The dim sky-line where England lay,
And boldly marched inland.
Before them lay the wilderness,
Bravely they plunged into the waste
By white foot never trod;
Bravely and busily they traced
The village boundaries, and placed
Their ploughs in virgin sod;
Built huts, and then a meeting-house
Where man might worship God.
The huts gave place to houses white;
The axe-affrighted woods
Shrank back to left, shrank back to right;
The valleys laughed with harvest light;
The river’s vagrant moods
Were curbed by clattering wheels, which shook
The once green solitudes.
And years flowed on, and life flowed by.
The hills were named and known.
The young looked out with eager eye
From the “old” village; by and by
They stole forth one by one,
Leaving the old folks in their homes
And one by one the old folks died,
Each in his lonely way.
The doors which once stood open wide,
To let a busy human tide
Sweep in and out all day,
Were closed; the unseeing windows stared
Just as a blind man may.
The mills, abandoned, ceased to whir;
The unchecked river ran
Its old-time courses, merrier,
And glad in spirit, as it were,
For its escape from man,
Teased the dumb wheels, and mocked and played
As only a river can.
Looking to-day across the space,
Beyond the flower-fringed track
Which once was road, the eye can trace
The outlines of a cellar-place,
A half-burned chimney-back:
They mark the ruins of a home
And here and there an old dame stands
Some farm-house window nigh,
Or, dark against the pasture-lands,
A ploughman old, with trembling hands,
Checks his team suddenly,
And turns a gray head to the road
To watch the passer-by.
Above the empty village lies
One thickly peopled spot,
Where gray stones in gray silence rise,
And tell to sunset and sunrise
Of past lives that are not,—
The lives that fought and strove and toiled
And builded. And for what?
’Tis Nature’s law in everything.
The river seeks the sea;
But not one droplet wandering
Goes ever back to feed the spring.
Such things are and must be.
The gone is gone, the lost is lost,
Fled irrevocably.
Old village on the lonely hill,
Deserted by your own,
Your spended lifelike mountain rill
Has gone to swell the tide and fill
Some sea unseen, unknown.
Let this brave thought your comfort be,
As thus you die alone.