THE OLD WOODEN CHURCH ON THE GREEN.

———

BY HENRY MORFORD.

———

They are all laying hands on the things I loved best,

They are all closing up my dim past,

They are all heaping sods upon Memory’s breast,

Till but little is left me at last;

But I sometimes look back to the things of old time,

And I think of the things that have been,

And the memory comes, like a nursery rhyme,

Of the Old Wooden Church on the Green.

It is little and old in this plentiful age,

It has neither a steeple nor bell,

It is bowing its roof to the pitiless rage

Of the storms it has battled so well;

It is guiltless of glass, and the paint’s washed away

In the storm and the sunshine, I ween,

For no kind hand attends, for this many a day,

To the Old Wooden Church on the Green.

Beneath the mossed roof the small swallow-nests hang,

And the bees hive and swarm in the eaves,

And the loosed shutters swing with a sorrowful clang

When the wind through the old church-yard grieves;

Neglect and decay are around the old walls,

Dark ruin looks over the scene,

Oh, sad is the sound of the lone foot that falls,

Round the Old Wooden Church on the Green.

Yet I’d rather to-day they should crumble away,

Earth’s proudest and loftiest pile,

Built up as a mock for neglect and decay,

To stand while the broad heavens smile—

Than tear off one shred from its moss-eaten roof,

Or call it the shabby and mean,

For we’re all, when grown old and neglected enough

Like the Old Wooden Church on the Green.

And I hear the sweet voices that chanted within,

Oh! many a summer ago,

Still chanting the hymn when the eve closes in,

Though they echo from heaven, I know;

And I sit in the pew where they sat by my side,

And as back in the shadows I lean,

I hear the low prayers that echoed and died

In the Old Wooden Church on the Green.

I will weep when it falls, I will smile while it stands,

As winter on winter goes by,

Protected by naught but invisible hands,

Till I sleep in its shade when I die;

Let them bury me there in a mound poor and low,

When the blast of the winter is keen,

That the winds that wail over me pass as they go

The Old Wooden Church on the Green.

OPERA EXTRAVAGANCE. Engraved expressly for Graham’s Magazine.