15. * Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. Dear dead women, with such hair, too— what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old. BY THE FIRESIDE. 1. How well I know what I mean to do When the long dark Autumn evenings come, And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? 2. I shall be found by the fire, suppose, O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age, While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, And I turn the page, and I turn the page, Not verse now, only prose! 3. Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip, "There he is at it, deep in Greek — Now or never, then, out we slip To cut from the hazels by the creek A mainmast for our ship." 4. I shall be at it indeed, my friends! 5. The outside-frame like your hazel-trees And a rarer sort succeeds to these, And youth, by green degrees. 6. I follow wherever I am led, Knowing so well the leader's hand Oh, woman-country, wooed, not wed, Loved all the more by earth's male-lands, Laid to their hearts instead! 7. Look at the ruined chapel again 8. A turn, and we stand in the heart of things; 9. Does it feed the little lake below? How sharp the silver spear-heads charge When Alp meets Heaven in snow. 10. On our other side is the straight-up rock; And a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it By boulder-stones where lichens mock The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit Their teeth to the polished block. 11. Oh, the sense of the yellow mountain flowers, And the thorny balls, each three in one, The chestnuts throw on our path in showers, For the drop of the woodland fruit's begun These early November hours — 12. That crimson the creeper's leaf across Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt, O'er a shield, else gold from rim to boss, And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped Elf-needled mat of moss, 13. By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged Where a freaked, fawn-coloured, flaky crew 14. And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge 15. The chapel and bridge are of stone alike, Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke. |