.

.

.
Over the wooded northern ridge, Between its houses brown, To the dark tunnel of the bridge The street comes straggling down.
You catch a glimpse, through birch and pine, Of gable, roof, and porch, The tavern with its swinging sign, The sharp horn of the church.
The river's steel-blue crescent curves To meet, in ebb and flow, The single broken wharf that serves For sloop and gundelow.
With salt sea-scents along its shores The heavy hay-boats crawl, The long antennae of their oars In lazy rise and fall.
Along the gray abutment's wall The idle shad-net dries; The toll-man in his cobbler's stall Sits smoking with closed eyes.
You hear the pier's low undertone Of waves that chafe and gnaw; You start,--a skipper's horn is blown To raise the creaking draw.
At times a blacksmith's anvil sounds With slow and sluggard beat, Or stage-coach on its dusty rounds Fakes up the staring street.
A place for idle eyes and ears, A cobwebbed nook of dreams; Left by the stream whose waves are years The stranded village seems.
And there, like other moss and rust, The native dweller clings, And keeps, in uninquiring trust, The old, dull round of things.
The fisher drops his patient lines, The farmer sows his grain, Content to hear the murmuring pines Instead of railroad-train.
Go where, along the tangled steep That slopes against the west, The hamlet's buried idlers sleep In still profounder rest.
Throw back the locust's flowery plume, The birch's pale-green scarf, And break the web of brier and bloom From name and epitaph.
A simple muster-roll of death, Of pomp and romance shorn, The dry, old names that common breath Has cheapened and outworn.
Yet pause by one low mound, and part The wild vines o'er it laced, And read the words by rustic art Upon its headstone traced.
Haply yon white-haired villager Of fourscore years can say What means the noble name of her Who sleeps with common clay.
An exile from the Gascon land Found refuge here and rest, And loved, of all the village band, Its fairest and its best.
He knelt with her on Sabbath morns, He worshipped through her eyes, And on the pride that doubts and scorns Stole in her faith's surprise.
Her simple daily life he saw By homeliest duties tried, In all things by an untaught law Of fitness justified.
For her his rank aside he laid; He took the hue and tone Of lowly life and toil, and made Her simple ways his own.
Yet still, in gay and careless ease, To harvest-field or dance He brought the gentle courtesies, The nameless grace of France.
And she who taught him love not less From him she loved in turn Caught in her sweet unconsciousness What love is quick to learn.
Each grew to each in pleased accord, Nor knew the gazing town If she looked upward to her lord Or he to her looked down.
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.
AMONG THE HILLS 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.
PRELUDE.
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.