“DORCHESTER.”

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BY W. GILMORE SIMMS, AUTHOR OF “ATALANTIS,” “THE YEMASSEE,” ETC.

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[“Dorchester” was a beautiful little country town on the banks of the river Keawah, now Ashley, about twenty miles from the city of Charleston, in South Carolina. It was chiefly settled by New Englanders. For a time it flourished and became a market town of some importance. The planters of the neighborhood were generally persons of substance, who lived in considerable state, and exercised the virtues of hospitality in an eminent degree; but with the war of the Revolution, in which it suffered greatly, it began to decline, and its only remains now are the ruins of its church and the open walls of the old British fort. From a memorandum which I made during a visit to the spot in 1833, I take the following:—“The fort made of tapis—works still in considerable preservation—the wood-work alone decayed—the magazine in ruins—and the area overgrown with plum trees. The church still standing—the steeple shattered by lightning, and the wooden interior torn out—the roof beginning to decay at the ends of the rafters. It will probably fall in before very long.” This prediction was not permitted to be verified. The fabric, I learn, has since been utterly destroyed by an incendiary. Dorchester was distinguished by several actions of partisan warfare during the Revolution It was, by turns, a military depot of the Carolinians and the British. These particulars will explain the little poem which follows.]

Not with irreverential thought and feeling I resign

The tree that was a chronicle in other days than mine;

Its mossy branches crown’d the grove, when, hastily array’d,

Came down the gallant partisan to battle in the shade;

It saw his fearless eye grow dark, it heard his trumpet cry,

When, at its roots, the combat o’er, he laid him down to die;

The warm blood gushing from his heart hath stain’d the sod below—

That tree shall be my chronicle, for it hath seen it flow!

Sweet glide thy waters, Ashley, and pleasant on thy banks

The mossy oak and mossy pine stand forth in solemn ranks;

They crown thee in a fitting guise, since, with a gentle play,

Through bending groves and circling dells thou tak’st thy lonely way:

Thine is the Summer’s loveliness—thy Winter too hath charms,

Thus sheltered in thy mazy course beneath their Druid arms;

And thine the recollection old, which honors thy decline,

When happy thousands saw thee rove, and Dorchester was thine.

But Dorchester is thine no more, its gallant pulse is still,

The wild cat prowls among its graves and screams the whippoorwill,

A mournful spell is on its homes, where solitude, supreme,

Still, coaching in her tangled woods, dreams one unbroken dream:

The cotter seeks a foreign home,—the cottage roof is down,

The ivy clambers all uncheck’d above the steeple’s crown;

And doubly gray, with grief and years, the old church tott’ring stands,

Ah! how unlike that holy home not built with human hands!

These ruins have their story, and, with a reverent fear,

I glide beneath the broken arch and through the passage drear;

The hillock at my feet grows warm—beneath it beats a heart

Whose pulses wake to utterance, whose accents make me start;

That heart hath beat in battle, when the thunder-cloud was high,

And death, in every form of fate, careering through the sky;

Beside it now, another heart, in peace but lately known,

Beats with a kindred pulse, but hath a story of its own.

Ah! sad the fate of maiden whose lover falls in fight,

Condemned to bear, in widowhood, the lonely length of light;—

The days that come without a sun, the nights that bring no sleep;

The long, long watch, the weariness, the same, sad toil—to weep!

Methinks, the call is happiness, when sudden sounds the strain

That summons back the exiled heart of love to heaven again;—

No trumpet-tone of battle, but a soft note sweetly clear,

Like that which even now is heard when doves are wooing near.