“Hummed the pillow, ‘My down once trembled
On nightingales’ throats that flew
Through the twilight gardens of Hafix
To gather quaint dreams for you.’
“Ah me! if the Past have heartsease,
It hath also rue for men:—
I come back: those unhealed ridges
Were not in the churchyard then!
“But (I think) the house is unaltered—
I will go and ask to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to the brook.
“Unaltered! alas for the sameness
That makes the change but more!
How estranged seems the look of the windows,
How grates my foot on the floor!
“To learn this simple lesson
Need I go to Paris or Rome,
That the many make a household,
But only one the Home?
“’Twas a smile, ’twas a garment’s rustle,
’Twas nothing that you could phrase,
But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious
And put on her looks and ways.
“Were it mine, I would close the shutters
As you smooth the lids of the dead,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a Home that is dead!
“For it died that summer morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark in the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.”
“Is it anything?” he wrote to the friend to whom he sent it, or is it nothing? Or is it one of those nothings that is something? I think the last stanza should be last but one and begin ‘But it died,’ if ‘dwelling’ will do for an antecedent. Is the first half too special?”
There was indeed a gayer mood on him in the midst of his work which could make him turn his discomforts into a jest. “I cannot learn the knack of doing six things at once,” he wrote to a friend. “I had my whole time to myself for too many years, and the older I grow the unreadier writer I become. What a lucky dog Methusalem was! Nothing to know, and nine hundred years to learn it in.” He was writing to a somewhat dry-minded correspondent, but to a more congenial friend he wrote at the same time: “Nothing has happened to me since I saw you except manuscripts, and my mind is gradually becoming a blank. It is very depleting, I find, to read stuff week in and week out (I almost spelt week with an a), and does not help one to be a lively correspondent. But I believe I could dictate five love stories at the same time (as Napoleon the Other could despatches) without mixing them in the least—and indeed it would make no difference if I did. ‘Julie gazed into the eyes of her lover, which sought in vain to escape her enquiring look, while the tears trembled on her long dark lashes, but fell not (that ‘fell not’ is new, I think). “And is it indeed so?” she said slowly, after a pause in which her heart leaped like an imprisoned bird.’—‘Meanwhile, the elder of the two, a stern-featured man of some forty winters, played with the hilt of his dagger, half drawing and then sheathing again the Damascus blade thin as the eloquence of Everett and elastic as the conscience of Cass. “Didst mark the old man tremble?” “Cospetto! my uncle, a noted leech, was wont to say that iron was a good tonic for unsteady nerves,” and still he trifled with the ominous looking weapon, etc., etc.’ I think of taking a contract to write all the stories myself at so much a dozen—a good murder or a happy marriage to be paid double.”