How sweet, when summer’s day was o’er,
His violin’s mirth and wail,
The walk on pleasant Newbury’s shore,
The river’s moonlit sail!
Ah! life is brief, though love be long;
The altar and the bier,
The burial hymn and bridal song,
Were both in one short year!
Her rest is quiet on the hill,
Beneath the locust’s bloom
Far off her lover sleeps as still
Within his scutcheoned tomb.
The Gascon lord, the village maid,
In death still clasp their hands;
The love that levels rank and grade
Unites their severed lands.
What matter whose the hillside grave,
Or whose the blazoned stone?
Forever to her western wave
Shall whisper blue Garonne!
O Love!—so hallowing every soil
That gives thy sweet flower room,
Wherever, nursed by ease or toil,
The human heart takes bloom!—
Plant of lost Eden, from the sod
Of sinful earth unriven,
White blossom of the trees of God
Dropped down to us from heaven!
This tangled waste of mound and stone
Is holy for thy sale;
A sweetness which is all thy own
Breathes out from fern and brake.
And while ancestral pride shall twine
The Gascon’s tomb with flowers,
Fall sweetly here, O song of mine,
With summer’s bloom and showers!
And let the lines that severed seem
Unite again in thee,
As western wave and Gallic stream
Are mingled in one sea!
1863.
This poem, when originally published, was dedicated
to Annie Fields, wife of the distinguished publisher,
James T. Fields, of Boston, in grateful acknowledgment
of the strength and inspiration I have found in her
friendship and sympathy. The poem in its first
form was entitled The Wife: an Idyl of Bearcamp
Water, and appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for January,
1868. When I published the volume Among the Hills,
in December of the same year, I expanded the Prelude
and filled out also the outlines of the story.
Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold
That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought,
Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod,
And the red pennons of the cardinal-flowers
Hang motionless upon their upright staves.
The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind,
Vying-weary with its long flight from the south,
Unfelt; yet, closely scanned, yon maple leaf
With faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams,
Confesses it. The locust by the wall
Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm.
A single hay-cart down the dusty road
Creaks slowly, with its driver fast asleep
On the load’s top. Against the neighboring
hill,
Huddled along the stone wall’s shady side,
The sheep show white, as if a snowdrift still
Defied the dog-star. Through the open door
