Reuben and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The Laird of Bretherton lives in the north,
Far, far up in the north countrie,
Beyond the Tweed, the Clyde and the Forth,
Even Beyond the Tay and the Dee;
In a green sunny glen,
Almost out of our ken,
And a somewhat mysterious man is he.

Children or wife he never knew—
His only companion a big tame goose:
At the jambs of the fireside sit these two—
He silent and thoughtful, it silent and croose;
And whether his thought
Be something or nought,
He's at least what the Scotch call “unco douce.”

214

To gentle or simple he seldom speaks
More than the syllable no or ay;
And often his tongue lies silent for weeks,
Unless when the goose gives a cackling cry:
Then a guttural note
Wells up in his throat,
But unknown the nature of his reply.

He can read, but he handles never a book;
As for papers they rarely come up the glen,
And never at all to his chimla nook—
For what are to him the doings of men?
They may love, they may hate,
They may legislate,—
He cares not a button how or when.

A grown-up man was he when they pass'd
The ten-pound bill of '32;
Household suffrage has come at last,
Yet his manhood seems but half gone through.
The whole of the time
He's been in his prime,
But with their Reform had nothing to do.

And the mighty battles have run their day—
Alma and misty Inkermann,
And the black revolt in India,
Where innocent blood in torrents ran,
And the gory well
Remains to tell
The dire success of a traitor's plan.

215

And Solferino's terrific fray,
Where lips of iron decided fates;
The sharp week's war in Germany;
And the grapple of death in the Western States,
When the world look'd on,
From Charleston
To Richmond's slowly yielding gates.

Great reputations have gone to the deuce,
And small ones come to immortal fame;
But what to Bretherton and his goose
How the one class went or the other came?
No requiem
Ever comes to them,
Or blatant sound of a living name.

They sit at the fire, the goose and the laird,
And he seems to be thinking hard and deep.
'Tween the goose and the fire his looks are shared;
The goose sits churming half asleep;
The tongues of fire
Lick higher, higher,
And with the smoke up the chimney leap.

He seems to delight in the churming goose,
And he seems to enjoy the curling reek;
To the tongues that play so fast and loose,
He listens, and thinks he can hear them speak:
No doubt they do,
And he knows too
That language older than Latin or Greek.

216

But list when the chimney begins to growl,
And the winds break out in their highest key,
And the glen is alive with whoop and howl,
All the spirits of air in jubilee,—
O then may be heard
The goose and the laird
Enjoying it all with a chuckling glee.

Or see them on sky-blue summer days,
When the laird's loved silence is all supreme,
And the bee on its tiny bugle plays
To deepen the glen in its noonday dream;
And the sheep are still,
In the shade of the hill,
And the tail-tossing cows knee-deep in the stream.

They leave their seats on the sleepy hearthstone,
And out to the drowsier braes they come,
Or, like creeping mist up the whinny loan,
They slowly wander a mile from home,
List'ning at times
To the grasshoppers' rhymes,
That spin in the grass their monotonous thrum.

The laird sits down on the mossy banks,
The goose goes nibbling the grass in the loan.
He snuffs the whins with half-uttered thanks,
Or a blue-bell peeps by the side of a stone,
And he kneels to gaze,
His eyes in a haze,
And his thoughts—but his thoughts remain his own.

217

Who knows but that this quiet man—
To all our worldly ways so blind—
Can see some farther than others can
Into the world this world behind,
And through the cell
Of the little blue-bell,
And into the very soul of the wind?

And knowing all men are geese, his choice
Is a goose that pretends to be nothing more.
He leaves the rest to their scramble and noise,
Their empty pretensions and blustering roar;—
Their risings and fallings,
Professions and callings,
An unheard sea on an unseen shore.