Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/315

Rh In various keys, deep, or like sleigh-bells tinkling, sounded the chiming cow-bells—

Starting and stilling, irregular; near or far away in the dusk—

And the nearer cows I heard chewing the cud, and breathing warm on the cool air of the mountain slope

In the night pasture.

II

Terrace on terrace rises the farm, from meadow and winding river to forest of chestnut and pine;

There by the high-road, among the embowering maples, nestles the ancient homestead;

From each new point of vantage lovelier seems the valley, and the hill-framed sunset ever more and more moving and glorious;

But when in the thunderous city I think of the mountain farm, nothing so sweet of remembrance,—holding me as in a dream,—

As the silver note of the unseen brook, and the clanging of the cow-bells fitfully in the dark, and the deep breathing of the cows

In the night pasture.

III

Then I think, not of myself—but an image comes to me of one who has past,

Of an old man bent with labor;

He, like his father before him, for many and many a year,

When the cows down the mountains have trudged in the summer evening, and after the evening milking,

Night after night, and year after year, back up the lane he has driven them, while the shepherd-dog leaped and barked—