LITMIR.BIZ

        You live, Sir, in these dales, a quiet life:

        Your years make up one peaceful family;

        And who would grieve and fret, if, welcome come

        And welcome gone, they are so like each other,

        They cannot be remember'd. Scarce a funeral

        Comes to this church-yard once, in eighteen months;

        And yet, some changes must take place among you.

        And you, who dwell here, even among these rocks

        Can trace the finger of mortality,

        And see, that with our threescore years and ten

        We are not all that perish. – I remember,

        For many years ago I pass'd this road,

        There was a foot-way all along the fields

        By the brook-side – 'tis gone – and that dark cleft!

        To me it does not seem to wear the face

        Which then it had.

                          Why, Sir, for aught I know,

        That chasm is much the same —

                                      But, surely, yonder —

        Aye, there indeed, your memory is a friend

        That does not play you false. – On that tall pike,

        (It is the loneliest place of all these hills)

        There were two Springs which bubbled side by side,

        As if they had been made that they might be

        Companions for each other: ten years back,

        Close to those brother fountains, the huge crag

        Was rent with lightning – one is dead and gone,

        The other, left behind, is flowing still. —

        For accidents and changes such as these,

        Why we have store of them! a water-spout

        Will bring down half a mountain; what a feast

        For folks that wander up and down like you,

        To see an acre's breadth of that wide cliff

        One roaring cataract – a sharp May storm

        Will come with loads of January snow,

        And in one night send twenty score of sheep

        To feed the ravens, or a Shepherd dies

        By some untoward death among the rocks:

        The ice breaks up and sweeps away a bridge —

        A wood is fell'd: – and then for our own homes!

        A child is born or christen'd, a field plough'd,

        A daughter sent to service, a web spun,

        The old house cloth is deck'd with a new face;

        And hence, so far from wanting facts or dates

        To chronicle the time, we all have here

        A pair of diaries, one serving, Sir,

        For the whole dale, and one for each fire-side,

        Your's was a stranger's judgment: for historians

        Commend me to these vallies.

                                     Yet your church-yard

        Seems, if such freedom may be used with you,

        To say that you are heedless of the past.

        Here's neither head nor foot-stone, plate of brass,

        Cross-bones or skull, type of our earthly state

        Or emblem of our hopes: the dead man's home

        Is but a fellow to that pasture field.

        Why there, Sir, is a thought that's new to me.

        The Stone-cutters, 'tis true, might beg their bread

        If every English church-yard were like ours:

        Yet your conclusion wanders from the truth.

        We have no need of names and epitaphs,

        We talk about the dead by our fire-sides.

        And then for our immortal part, we want

        No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale:

        The thought of death sits easy on the man

        Who has been born and dies among the mountains:

        Your dalesmen, then, do in each other's thoughts

        Possess a kind of second life: no doubt

        You, Sir, could help me to the history

        Of half these Graves?

        With what I've witness'd; and with what I've heard,

        Perhaps I might, and, on a winter's evening,

        If you were seated at my chimney's nook

        By turning o'er these hillocks one by one,

        We two could travel, Sir, through a strange round,

        Yet all in the broad high-way of the world.

        Now there's a grave – your foot is half upon it,

        It looks just like the rest, and yet that man

        Died broken-hearted.

                             'Tis a common case,

        We'll take another: who is he that lies

        Beneath yon ridge, the last of those three graves; —

        It touches on that piece of native rock

        Left in the church-yard wall.

                                     That's Walter Ewbank.

        He had as white a head and fresh a cheek

        As

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