The Old Village

IT lies among the greenest hillsNew England’s depths can show;About their base the river fillsAnd empties as the distant millsControl its ebb and flow:It had a quick life of its own,But that was long ago.

Two centuries have rolled awaySince a small, hardy bandTurned their sad faces from the bay,The dim sky-line where England lay,And boldly marched inland.Before them lay the wilderness,Behind them lay the strand.

Bravely they plunged into the wasteBy white foot never trod;Bravely and busily they tracedThe village boundaries, and placedTheir ploughs in virgin sod;Built huts, and then a meeting-houseWhere man might worship God.

The huts gave place to houses white;The axe-affrighted woodsShrank back to left, shrank back to right;The valleys laughed with harvest light;The river’s vagrant moodsWere curbed by clattering wheels, which shookThe once green solitudes.

And years flowed on, and life flowed by.The hills were named and known.The young looked out with eager eyeFrom the “old” village; by and byThey stole forth one by one,Leaving the old folks in their homesTo labor on alone.

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 tideSweep in and out all day,Were closed; the unseeing windows staredJust as a blind man may.

The mills, abandoned, ceased to whir;The unchecked river ranIts old-time courses, merrier,And glad in spirit, as it were,For its escape from man,Teased the dumb wheels, and mocked and playedAs only a river can.

Looking to-day across the space,Beyond the flower-fringed trackWhich once was road, the eye can traceThe outlines of a cellar-place,A half-burned chimney-back:They mark the ruins of a homeNow empty, cold, and black.

And here and there an old dame standsSome 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 roadTo watch the passer-by.

Above the empty village liesOne thickly peopled spot,Where gray stones in gray silence rise,And tell to sunset and sunriseOf past lives that are not,—The lives that fought and strove and toiledAnd builded. And for what?

’Tis Nature’s law in everything.The river seeks the sea;But not one droplet wanderingGoes 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 rillHas gone to swell the tide and fillSome sea unseen, unknown.Let this brave thought your comfort be,As thus you die alone.