Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/128

100 But where is the silent guest?

In what chamber shall she rest?

In this! Should she not go higher?

'T is damp, and the fire is gone."

You need not kindle the fire,

You need not call her at dawn."

Next morn he sallied forth

On his journey to the North.

O, bright the sunlight shone

Through boughs that the breezes stir;

But for her was lifted a stone

Under the churchyard fir.

THE HOMESTEAD

I

stays the house, here stay the selfsame places,

Here the white lilacs and the buttonwoods;

Here the dark pine-groves, there the river-floods,

And there the threading brook that interlaces

Green meadow-bank with meadow-bank the same.

The melancholy nightly chorus came

Long, long ago from the same pool, and yonder

Stark poplars lift in the same twilight air

Their ancient lonelinesses; nearer, fonder,

The black-heart cherry-tree's gaunt branches bare

Rasp on the same old window where I ponder.

II

And we, the only living, only pass;

We come and go, whither and whence we know not.

From birth to bound the same house keeps, alas!

New lives as gently as the old; there show not