Poems (Chandler)/The House in the Meadow

by Louise Chandler Moulton

THE HOUSE IN THE MEADOW.

T stands in a sunny meadow,
 The house so mossy and brown,
With its cumbrous old stone chimneys,
 And the grey roof sloping down.

The trees fold their green arms round it,
 The trees a century old;
And the winds go chaunting through them,
 And the sunbeams sift their gold.

The cowslips spring in the meadows,
 The roses bloom on the hill,
And beside the brook in the pasture
 The herds go feeding at will.

Within, in the wide old kitchen,
 The old folk sit in the sun
That creeps through the sheltering woodbine
 Till the day is almost done.

The children grew up and left them,—
 They sit in the sun alone,
And the old wife's ears are failing
 As she harks to the well-known tone

That won her heart in her girlhood,
 That has soothed her in many a care,
And praises her now for the brightness
 Her old face used to wear.

She thinks again of her bridal,
 How, dressed in her robe of white,
She stood by her gay young lover
 In the morning's rosy light:

Oh, the morning is rosy as ever,
 But the rose from her cheek has fled,
And the sunshine still is golden,
 But it falls on a silvered-head.

And the girlhood dreams, once vanished,
 Come back in her winter time
Till her feeble pulses tremble
 With the thrill of spring-time's prime.

And, looking forth from the window,
 She thinks how the trees have grown
Since, clad in her bridal whiteness,
 She crossed the old door-stone.

Though dimmed her eyes' bright azure,
 And dimmed her hair's young gold,
The love in her girlhood plighted
 Has never grown dim nor cold.

They sat in peace in the sunshine
 Till the day was almost done,
And then, at its close, an angel
 Stole over the threshold stone.

He folded their hands together,
 He touched their eyelids with balm,
And their last breath floated outward
 Like the close of a solemn psalm.

Like a bridal pair they traversed
 The unseen, mystical road
That leads to the Beautiful City
 Whose Builder and Maker is God.

Perhaps in that miracle country
 They will give her lost youth back,
And the flowers of the vanished spring-time
 Will bloom in the spirit's track.

One draught from the living waters
 Shall call back his manhood's prime;
And eternal years shall measure
 The love that outlasted time.

But the shapes that they left behind them,
 The wrinkles and silver hair,—
Made holy to us by the kisses
 The angel had printed there,—

We will hide away 'neath the willows
 When the day is low in the west,
Where the sunbeams cannot find them
 Nor the winds disturb their rest;

And we'll suffer no tell-tale tombstone,
 With its age and date, to rise
O'er the two who are old no longer
 In the Father's house in the skies.