Even now the villager can tell
Where Rolfe beside his hearthstone fell,
Still show the door of wasting oak,
Through which the fatal death-shot broke,
And point the curious stranger where
De Rouville’s corse lay grim and bare;
Whose hideous head, in death still feared,
Bore not a trace of hair or beard;
And still, within the churchyard ground,
Heaves darkly up the ancient mound,
Whose grass-grown surface overlies
The victims of that sacrifice.
1838.
In the early part of the present century, a fragment
of a statue, rudely chiselled from dark gray stone,
was found in the town of Bradford, on the Merrimac.
Its origin must be left entirely to conjecture.
The fact that the ancient Northmen visited the north-east
coast of North America and probably New England, some
centuries before the discovery of the western world
by Columbus, is very generally admitted.
Gift from the cold and silent Past!
A relic to the present cast,
Left on the ever-changing strand
Of shifting and unstable sand,
Which wastes beneath the steady chime
And beating of the waves of Time!
Who from its bed of primal rock
First wrenched thy dark, unshapely block?
Whose hand, of curious skill untaught,
Thy rude and savage outline wrought?
The waters of my native stream
Are glancing in the sun’s warm beam;
From sail-urged keel and flashing oar
The circles widen to its shore;
And cultured field and peopled town
Slope to its willowed margin down.
Yet, while this morning breeze is bringing
The home-life sound of school-bells ringing,
And rolling wheel, and rapid jar
Of the fire-winged and steedless car,
And voices from the wayside near
Come quick and blended on my ear,—
A spell is in this old gray stone,
My thoughts are with the Past alone!
A change!—The steepled town no more
Stretches along the sail-thronged shore;
Like palace-domes in sunset’s cloud,
Fade sun-gilt spire and mansion proud
Spectrally rising where they stood,
I see the old, primeval wood;
Dark, shadow-like, on either hand
I see its solemn waste expand;
It climbs the green and cultured hill,
It arches o’er the valley’s rill,
And leans from cliff and crag to throw
Its wild arms o’er the stream below.
Unchanged, alone, the same bright river
Flows on, as it will flow forever
I listen, and I hear the low
Soft ripple where its waters go;
I hear behind the panther’s cry,
The wild-bird’s scream goes thrilling by,
And shyly on the river’s brink
The deer is stooping down to drink.
