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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=420671" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Countess</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">TO E. W.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I KNOW not, Time and Space so intervene,<br>Whether, still waiting with a trust serene,<br>Thou bearest up thy fourscore years and ten,<br>Or, called at last, art now Heaven's citizen;<br>But, here or there, a pleasant thought of thee,<br>Like an old friend, all day has been with me.<br>The shy, still boy, for whom thy kindly hand<br>Smoothed his hard pathway to the wonder-land<br>Of thought and fancy, in gray manhood yet<br>Keeps green the memory of his early debt.<br>To-day, when truth and falsehood speak their words<br>Through hot-lipped cannon and the teeth of swords,<br>Listening with quickened heart and ear intent<br>To each sharp clause of that stern argument,<br>I still can hear at times a softer note<br>Of the old pastoral music round me float,<br>While through the hot gleam of our civil strife<br>Looms the green mirage of a simpler life.<br>As, at his alien post, the sentinel<br>Drops the old bucket in the homestead well,<br>And hears old voices in the winds that toss<br>Above his head the live-oak's beard of moss,<br>So, in our trial-time, and under skies<br>Shadowed by swords like Islam's paradise,<br>I wait and watch, and let my fancy stray<br>To milder scenes and youth's Arcadian day;<br>And howsoe'er the pencil dipped in dreams<br>Shades the brown woods or tints the sunset streams,<br>The country doctor in the foreground seems,<br>Whose ancient sulky down the village lanes<br>Dragged, like a war-car, captive ills and pains.<br>I could not paint the scenery of my song,<br>Mindless of one who looked thereon so long;<br>Who, night and day, on duty's lonely round,<br>Made friends o' the woods and rocks, and knew the sound<br>Of each small brook, and what the hillside trees<br>Said to the winds that touched their leafy keys;<br>Who saw so keenly and so well could paint<br>The village-folk, with all their humors quaint,<br>The parson ambling on his wall-eyed roan.<br>Grave and erect, with white hair backward blown;<br>The tough old boatman, half amphibious grown;<br>The muttering witch-wife of the gossip's tale,<br>And the loud straggler levying his blackmail,--<br>Old customs, habits, superstitions, fears,<br>All that lies buried under fifty years.<br>To thee, as is most fit, I bring my lay,<br>And, grateful, own the debt I cannot pay.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">. . . . . . . . . .</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Over the wooded northern ridge,<br>Between its houses brown,<br>To the dark tunnel of the bridge<br>The street comes straggling down.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You catch a glimpse, through birch and pine,<br>Of gable, roof, and porch,<br>The tavern with its swinging sign,<br>The sharp horn of the church.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The river's steel-blue crescent curves<br>To meet, in ebb and flow,<br>The single broken wharf that serves<br>For sloop and gundelow.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">With salt sea-scents along its shores<br>The heavy hay-boats crawl,<br>The long antennae of their oars<br>In lazy rise and fall.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Along the gray abutment's wall<br>The idle shad-net dries;<br>The toll-man in his cobbler's stall<br>Sits smoking with closed eyes.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You hear the pier's low undertone<br>Of waves that chafe and gnaw;<br>You start,--a skipper's horn is blown<br>To raise the creaking draw.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">At times a blacksmith's anvil sounds<br>With slow and sluggard beat,<br>Or stage-coach on its dusty rounds<br>Fakes up the staring street.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A place for idle eyes and ears,<br>A cobwebbed nook of dreams;<br>Left by the stream whose waves are years<br>The stranded village seems.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And there, like other moss and rust,<br>The native dweller clings,<br>And keeps, in uninquiring trust,<br>The old, dull round of things.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The fisher drops his patient lines,<br>The farmer sows his grain,<br>Content to hear the murmuring pines<br>Instead of railroad-train.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Go where, along the tangled steep<br>That slopes against the west,<br>The hamlet's buried idlers sleep<br>In still profounder rest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Throw back the locust's flowery plume,<br>The birch's pale-green scarf,<br>And break the web of brier and bloom<br>From name and epitaph.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A simple muster-roll of death,<br>Of pomp and romance shorn,<br>The dry, old names that common breath<br>Has cheapened and outworn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet pause by one low mound, and part<br>The wild vines o'er it laced,<br>And read the words by rustic art<br>Upon its headstone traced.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Haply yon white-haired villager<br>Of fourscore years can say<br>What means the noble name of her<br>Who sleeps with common clay.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">An exile from the Gascon land<br>Found refuge here and rest,<br>And loved, of all the village band,<br>Its fairest and its best.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He knelt with her on Sabbath morns,<br>He worshipped through her eyes,<br>And on the pride that doubts and scorns<br>Stole in her faith's surprise.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Her simple daily life he saw<br>By homeliest duties tried,<br>In all things by an untaught law<br>Of fitness justified.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For her his rank aside he laid;<br>He took the hue and tone<br>Of lowly life and toil, and made<br>Her simple ways his own.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet still, in gay and careless ease,<br>To harvest-field or dance<br>He brought the gentle courtesies,<br>The nameless grace of France.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And she who taught him love not less<br>From him she loved in turn<br>Caught in her sweet unconsciousness<br>What love is quick to learn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Each grew to each in pleased accord,<br>Nor knew the gazing town<br>If she looked upward to her lord<br>Or he to her looked down.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">How sweet, when summer's day was o'er,<br>His violin's mirth and wail,<br>The walk on pleasant Newbury's shore,<br>The river's moonlit sail!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ah! life is brief, though love be long;<br>The altar and the bier,<br>The burial hymn and bridal song,<br>Were both in one short year!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Her rest is quiet on the hill,<br>Beneath the locust's bloom<br>Far off her lover sleeps as still<br>Within his scutcheoned tomb.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The Gascon lord, the village maid,<br>In death still clasp their hands;<br>The love that levels rank and grade<br>Unites their severed lands.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What matter whose the hillside grave,<br>Or whose the blazoned stone?<br>Forever to her western wave<br>Shall whisper blue Garonne!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O Love!--so hallowing every soil<br>That gives thy sweet flower room,<br>Wherever, nursed by ease or toil,<br>The human heart takes bloom!--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Plant of lost Eden, from the sod<br>Of sinful earth unriven,<br>White blossom of the trees of God<br>Dropped down to us from heaven!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This tangled waste of mound and stone<br>Is holy for thy sale;<br>A sweetness which is all thy own<br>Breathes out from fern and brake.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And while ancestral pride shall twine<br>The Gascon's tomb with flowers,<br>Fall sweetly here, O song of mine,<br>With summer's bloom and showers!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And let the lines that severed seem<br>Unite again in thee,<br>As western wave and Gallic stream<br>Are mingled in one sea!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=John+Greenleaf+Whittier">John Greenleaf Whittier</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=420671" data-title="The Countess de John Greenleaf Whittier" data-description="TO E. W.

I KNOW not, Time and Space so intervene,
Whether, still waiting with a trust serene,
Thou bearest up thy fourscore years and ten,
Or, called at last, art now Heaven's citizen;
But, here or there, a pleasant thought of thee,
Like an old f..."></div>
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