Her Title-Deeds.
INSIDE the cottage door she sits,
Just where the sunlight, softest there,
Slants down on snowy kerchief's bands,
On folded hands and silvered hair.
The garden pale her world shuts in,
A simple world made sweet with thyme,
Where life, soft lulled by droning bees,
Flows to the mill-stream's lapsing rhyme.
Poor are her cottage walls, and bare;
Too mean and small to harbor pride,
Yet with a musing gaze she sees
Her broad domains extending wide.
Green slopes of hills, and waving fields,
With blooming hedges set between,
Through shifting veils of tender mist,
Smile, half revealed, a mingled scene.
All hers, for lovingly she holds
A yellow packet in her hand,
Whose ancient, faded script proclaims
Her title to this spreading land.
Old letters! On the trembling page
Drop unawares, unheeded tears.
These are her title-deeds, her lands
Spread through the realms of by-gone years.
INTERLUDES.
Voices of the Old, Old Days.
OH, voices of the old, old days,
Speak once again to me,
I walk alone the old, old ways
And miss your melody.
To-night I close my tired eyes
And hear the rain drip slow,
And dream a hand is on my brow
That pressed it long ago.
My thoughts stray through the lonely night
Until I seem to see
Home faces, in the firelight,
That always smiled on me.
Those shadows dancing on the walls
Are not by embers cast,
They are the forms my heart recalls
From out the happy past.
Forgotten is the gathering gloom,
The night's deep loneliness,
As round me in the silent room
With noiseless tread they press.
Though in the dark the rain sobs on,
I heed its sound no more;
For voices of the old, old days
Are calling as of yore.