A COTTAGE MEMORY.
Reading edition
In that far foreign country, the dream of old days
And old haunts often bears me to Anthony Wray’s;
The white little cottage with nest-crowded eaves,
Peeping out half the year from an ambush of leaves.
And now once again have my footsteps been there,
And have found it—deserted, dismantled, and bare;
Except where the wall-flow’rs still cluster and wave
On the gable: they now are like flow’rs on a grave.
At that window, I thought as I passed through the door,
Where the late sunbeam strikes down the weed-covered floor,
How often the sunlight and moonlight have shone
Upon bright, living faces, that now are all gone.
In the choice ingle-nook stood no Martha’s arm-chair,
But a heap of dead leaves which the wind had swept there;
The low-talking wind that breathed thoughts of the time
When young voices rang round like a holiday chime.
And the hearth had become like a cold churchyard stone,
Encrusted with mould and with moss overgrown,
That had glowed through so many a long winter night,
The heart of the cottage, a core of warm light.
What talk and what mirth there! what tales told or read
To the children that listened in joy tinged with dread!
A storm shakes the window; they solemnly gaze
On each other, and draw their stools nearer the blaze.
Their father is drowsy with labour gone through,
And the deep satisfaction of nothing to do;
The woof of light sleep in its network has bound him,
And home mildly shines through the mist that’s around him.
The mother sits knitting and smiling fond praise;
The cheek of the youngest shines warm in the blaze
As he rests his white head on his grandmother’s knee;
Alas! that these pictures mere phantoms should be.
As ghosts of burnt roses cloud up from their ashes,
Rise scenes from the past in these transient flashes;
Thin visions, soon melted, which leave the heart sore,
By half-showing that which they will not restore.
Could it be that this Household was gone, and for ever?
The wood looked unchanged, and the fields, and the river;
Co-tenants of time, even part did these seem
Of beings who now are but shapes of a dream.
The broad-leaved horse-chesnut my thoughts used to wed
With those for whose shelter its boughs seemed to spread,
Dipped slowly in sunlight its fans as of old,
But beneath, all had passed “like a tale that is told.”
Long I stood, and had no word of comfort to say
Yet not unconsoled did I turn me away:
Thank God for the faith that is stronger than grief,
The fountain that springs to the parched soul’s relief.
The whispered assurance which raises and soothes,
That these are the phantoms, and those still the truths;
And their trials and virtues, their tears and their mirth
Not faded like yesterday’s light from the earth!