Shut down and clasp the heavy lids; 735 I hear again the voice that bids

The dreamer leave his dream midway
For larger hopes and graver fears:
Life greatens in these later years,
The century's aloe flowers to-day!

740 Yet, haply, in some lull of life,

Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
The wordling's eyes shall gather dew,
Dreaming in throngful city ways
Of winter joys his boyhood knew;
745 And dear and early friends the few

750

Who yet remain — shall pause to view
These Flemish pictures of old days;
Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
And stretch the hands of memory forth
To warm them at the wood-fire's blaze!
And thanks untraced to lips unknown
Shall greet me like the odors blown
From unseen meadows newly mown,
Or lilies floating in some pond,

755 Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond;
The traveller owns the grateful sense

Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air.

741. The name is drawn from a historic compact in 1040, when the Church forbade the barons to make any attack on each other between sunset on Wednesday and sunrise on the following Monday, or upon any ecclesiastical fast or feast day. It also provided that no man was to molest a laborer working in the fields, or to lay hands on any implement of husbandry, on pain of excommunication.

747. The Flemish school of painting was chiefly occupied with homely interiors.

II.

AMONG THE HILLS.

PRELUDE.

ALONG the roadside, like the flowers of gold That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought, Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod, And the red pennons of the cardinal-flowers 5 Hang motionless upon their upright staves. The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind, Wing-weary with its long flight from the south, Unfelt; yet, closely scanned, yon maple leaf With faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams, to Confesses it. The locust by the wall

Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm. A single hay-cart down the dusty road Creaks slowly, with its driver fast asleep On the load's top. Against the neighboring hill, 15 Huddled along the stone wall's shady side, The sheep show white, as if a snowdrift still Defied the dog-star. Through the open A drowsy smell of flowers

door

gray heliotrope, And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette — 20 Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends To the pervading symphony of peace.

No time is this for hands long over-worn

To task their strength: and (unto Him be praise
Who giveth quietness!) the stress and strain

2. The Incas were the kings of the ancient Peruvians. At Yucay, their favorite residence, the gardens, according to Prescott, contained "forms of vegetable life skillfully imitated in gold and silver." See History of the Conquest of Peru, i. 130.

25 Of years that did the work of centuries

Have ceased, and we can draw our breath once

more

Freely and full. So, as yon harvesters

Make glad their nooning underneath the elms With tale and riddle and old snatch of song, 30 I lay aside grave themes, and idly turn

The leaves of memory's sketch-book, dreaming

o'er

Old summer pictures of the quiet hills,
And human life, as quiet, at their feet.

And yet not idly all. A farmer's son,
35 Proud of field-lore and harvest craft, and feeling
All their fine possibilities, how rich
And restful even poverty and toil

Become when beauty, harmony, and love
Sit at their humble hearth as angels sat
40 At evening in the patriarch's tent, when man
Makes labor noble, and his farmer's frock
The symbol of a Christian chivalry
Tender and just and generous to her

Who clothes with grace all duty; still, I know 45 Too well the picture has another side,

How wearily the grind of toil goes on

Where love is wanting, how the eye and ear
And heart are starved amidst the plenitude
Of nature, and how hard and colorless
50 Is life without an atmosphere. I look
Across the lapse of half a century,

And call to mind old homesteads, where no flower
Told that the spring had come, but evil weeds,
Nightshade and rough-leaved burdock in the place

26. The volume in which this poem stands first, and to which It gives the name, was published in the fall of 1868.

55 of the sweet doorway greeting of the rose And honeysuckle, where the house walls seemed Blistering in sun, without a tree or vine

To cast the tremulous shadow of its leaves Across the curtainless windows from whose panes 60 Fluttered the signal rags of shiftlessness; Within, the cluttered kitchen floor, unwashed (Broom-clean I think they called it); the best

room

Stifling with cellar damp, shut from the air In hot midsummer, bookless, pictureless 65 Save the inevitable sampler hung

Over the fireplace, or a mourning piece,

A green-haired woman, peony-cheeked, beneath Impossible willows; the wide-throated hearth Bristling with faded pine-boughs half concealing 70 The piled-up rubbish at the chimney's back; And, in sad keeping with all things about them, Shrill, querulous women, sour and sullen men, Untidy, loveless, old before their time,

With scarce a human interest save their own 75 Monotonous round of small economies,

Or the poor scandal of the neighborhood;
Blind to the beauty everywhere revealed,
Treading the May-flowers with regardless feet;
For them the song-sparrow and the bobolink
80 Sang not, nor winds made music in the leaves;
For them in vain October's holocaust

Burned, gold and crimson, over all the hills,
The sacramental mystery of the woods.
Church-goers, fearful of the unseen Powers,
85 But grumbling over pulpit-tax and pew-rent,
Saving, as shrewd economists, their souls

And winter pork with the least possible outlay
Of salt and sanctity; in daily life

Showing as little actual comprehension
90 Of Christian charity and love and duty,
As if the Sermon on the Mount had been
Outdated like a last year's almanac :

Rich in broad woodlands and in half-tilled fields,
And yet so pinched and bare and comfortless,
95 The veriest straggler limping on his rounds,
The sun and air his sole inheritance,
Laughed at poverty that paid its taxes,
And hugged his rags in self-complacency!

Not such should be the homesteads of a land 100 Where whoso wisely wills and acts may dwell As king and lawgiver, in broad-acred state, With beauty, art, taste, culture, books, to make His hour of leisure richer than a life

Of fourscore to the barons of old time, 105 Our yeoman should be equal to his home

Set in the fair, green valleys, purple walled, A man to match his mountains, not to creep Dwarfed and abased below them. I would fain In this light way (of which I needs must own 110 With the knife-grinder of whom Canning sings, "Story, God bless you! I have none to tell you!") Invite the eye to see and heart to feel

The beauty and the joy within their reach,
Home, and home loves, and the beatitudes

110. The Anti-Jacobin was a periodical published in England in 1797-98, to ridicule democratic opinions, and in it Canning, who afterward became premier of England, wrote many light verses and jeux d'esprit, among them a humorous poem called the Needy Knife-Grinder, in burlesque of a poem by Southey The knife-grinder is anxiously appealed to to tell his story of wrong and injustice, but answers as here:

66 Story, God bless you! I've none to tell."