The weekly pioneer and Democrat., 1863-05-01

Over the wooded northern ridge,
Between its houses brown,
To the dark tunnel of the bridge,
s.sa The street comes struggling down.
You catch glimpse through birch and pin
OF gablO, roof, and porch,
The tavern with its swinging sigr,
The sharp horn of the church.
The rivers steel-blue crescent curves
To meet, in cob and flow,
The single broken wharf that serves
For sloop and gundelow.
With salt sea-scents along its shores
The heavy hayboats crawl,
The long antcnn9 of their oars
In lazy rise and fall.
Along the gray abutment's wall
The idle shad-net dries;
The toll-man in his cobbler's stall
Sits smoking with closed eyes.
You hear the piers low undertone
OF waves that chafe and gnaw;
You start-a shippers horn is blown
To raise the creaking draw.
At times a blacksmiths anvil sounds
With slow and sluggard beat,
Or stage coach on its dusty rounds
Wakes up the staring street.
place for idle eyes and ears
\ cobWebbed nook of dreams;
Left by the stream whose waves are years
The stranded village seems.
And there. like other moss and rust,
The native dweller clings
And keeps, in uninquirlDg trust,
The Old dull round of things.
The fisher drops his patient lines,
The farmer sOws his grain,
Content to hear the murmuring pines
Instead Of railroad train.
Go where, along the tangled steep
That slopes against the West,
The hamet's buried idlers sleep
In still profounder rest.
Throw back the locust's tiowery plume,
The birchs pale-green scarf,
And break the web of brier and bloom
From name and epitaph.
4 simple muster roll of death,
OF pomp and romance shOrn,
The dry Old names that common breath
Has cheapened and OutwOrn.
Yet pause by one low mound and part
The wild vines DER it laced,
And read the words by rustic art
Upon its headStOnc traced.
HAPPY yon white haired villager
Of fOurscOre years can say
What means the noble name of her
Who sleeps with common clay.
An exile from the Gascon land
Found refuge here and rest,
And loved. of all the village band,
Its faireSt and its best.
He knelt with her on Sabbath morns,
He worshiped through her eyes,
And on the pride that doubts and scorns
Stole in her faiths surprise.
Her simple daily life he saw
By homelicst duties tried,
In all things by an untaught law
OF fitness justified.
For her his rank aside he laid;
He took the hue and tone
OF lowly life and toll, and made
Her sim; lie ways his own.
Yet still, in gay and careless ease,
To harvest-feld or dance
He brought the gentle cOurtesieS,
The namelesS grace OF France.
And she who taught him love, not less
From him she loved, in turn,
Caught in her sweet Inconsistencies
What love is quick to learn.
Each grew to each in pleased accord,
Nor knew the gazing town
If she looked upward TO her lord,
Or he to her looked down.
How sweet, when summers day was DER,
His viOlin's mirth and wall,
The walk on pleasant Newbury's shore.
The rivers mOonlit sail!
All. life is BRIEF though love be long:
The altar and the bier,
The burial hymn and bridal song,
Were both in one short year
Her rest is quiet on the hill,
Beneath the locust's bloom;
Far off her lover sleeps as still
Within his ScutcheOned tomb.
The Gascon lord, the village maid,
In death still clasp their hands
The love that levels rank and grade
Unites their severed lands.
What matter whose the hillside grave,
Or whose the blaZOned stone
Forever to her western wave
Shall whisper blue Garonne!
O, Love so hallowing every soil
That gives thy sweet flower room,
Wherever, nursed by ease or toll,
The human heart takes bloom IL
Plant of lost Eden from the sod.
OF sinful earth unriven,
White blossoms of the trees of god
Dropped down to us from heaven!- -
This tangled waste of mount and stone
Is holy for thy sake:
A sweetness which is all thy own
Breathes out from fern and brake!
And while ancestral pride shall twine
The Gascon's tomb with flowers,