Poetry of the Farm and Rural Life :: :: University of Virginia Library

I sat upon the broken wall and cast the line and hook
Below, within the waters of the half-obstructed brook;
And looked about, in moody thought, the dwindled surface o'er,
Where spread a lakelet's broad expanse, and deep, in days of yore.

Behind me leaned the ruined mill, in downhill of decay;
Its timbers bare, and gaping side half-opened to the day;
Its leaky flume and useless wheel all green with stagnant slime,
The water gurgling underneath with melancholy chime.

A phebe fearless built her nest within a leaning brace,
The solitary cheerful thing about the cheerless place;
And even she appeared to feel—or 'twas my somber mood,—
That poets e'en may overpaint the charms of solitude.

I thought on Time's mutations and the changes I had seen
Since the landscape of life's morning to me was fresh and green;—
“The very fish are changed!” I cried, and drew a shiner out
Where once I took, with boyish pride, a thirty-two ounce trout.

Then here was business, here was stir,—the bustle and the whirl,
Here came the jolly yeomanry, here came the clownish churl;
Here idlers by the winter fire, with checkers or with whist,
Quite willing waited while the stones were humming out the grist.

Here was the gossip and the wit of all the country side;
Here small official slates were made, and small officials tried;
With coming grain and going meal the frequent teams were seen;
Now, all approaches hitherward are sodded o'er with green.

Where are the men who hither brought the corn to make their bread?
I knew them when a little boy;—they're sleeping with the dead!
Like grain they're garnered up within some storehouse of the soul,
And of the miller long ago hath Death required toll.

So I thought on Time's mutations, of schemers and their schemes;
How very like, indeed, they are to dreamers and their dreams;
And when we contemplate the past, and when we dreams resume,
The self-same lamp that lights the one the other doth illume.