Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/437

Rh And the faces of preachers and prophets; of those who fervently cursed the unrighteous, and who to a world in darkness brought light everlasting;

And chief of all I saw in that crimson mirror the face of him whose spirit was bowed beneath the agonies of all mankind.

THE OLD HOUSE

I

of my forebears, home of my dreaming childhood,

House that I love with a love instinctive, changeless,

Ancestral, mystical, passionate, tender, sorrowful;

Old house where I was born and my mother before me—

Strangely the old house speaks to its child returning,

Speaks with a tone affectionate, intimate, sweet,

Made, mysterious, out of the voices of many—

Out of the accents of them, the loving, the loyal,

That still in memory soothe and murmur and call;

Voices that greeted my life and guided the journey,

Human voices, long hushed, and the subtler speech

That steals from the dumb, dead walls, and whispers and thrills,

From the shadowy chimney-places, and haunted nooks;

These centuried walls, this roof, and the buoyant branches

Of large-leaved, mottled buttonwoods, towering mightily,

And pines that my father planted, now loftily dying—

These are the vibrant notes of the one deep chord

That sings in my heart, here by the ancient hearthstone.

II

Five are the generations this place have humaned,

Leaving their impress, I think, on the breathèd air—

For full is the house of relics of lives departed: