With salt sea-scents along its shores
    The heavy hay-boats crawl,
  The long antennae of their oars
    In lazy rise and fall.

  Along the gray abutment’s wall
    The idle shad-net dries;
  The toll-man in his cobbler’s stall
    Sits smoking with closed eyes.

  You hear the pier’s low undertone
    Of waves that chafe and gnaw;
  You start,—­a skipper’s horn is blown
    To raise the creaking draw.

  At times a blacksmith’s anvil sounds
    With slow and sluggard beat,
  Or stage-coach on its dusty rounds
    Wakes up the staring street.

  A place for idle eyes and ears,
    A cobwebbed nook of dreams;
  Left by the stream whose waves are years
    The stranded village seems.

  And there, like other moss and rust,
    The native dweller clings,
  And keeps, in uninquiring trust,
    The old, dull round of things.

  The fisher drops his patient lines,
    The farmer sows his grain,
  Content to hear the murmuring pines
    Instead of railroad-train.

  Go where, along the tangled steep
    That slopes against the west,
  The hamlet’s buried idlers sleep
    In still profounder rest.

  Throw back the locust’s flowery plume,
    The birch’s pale-green scarf,
  And break the web of brier and bloom
    From name and epitaph.

  A simple muster-roll of death,
    Of pomp and romance shorn,
  The dry, old names that common breath
    Has cheapened and outworn.

  Yet pause by one low mound and part
    The wild vines o’er it laced,
  And read the words by rustic art
    Upon its headstone traced.

  Haply yon white-haired villager
    Of fourscore years can say
  What means the noble name of her
    Who sleeps with common clay.

  An exile from the Gascon land
    Found refuge here and rest,
  And loved, of all the village band,
    Its fairest and its best.

  He knelt with her on Sabbath morns,
    He worshipped through her eyes,
  And on the pride that doubts and scorns
    Stole in her faith’s surprise.

  Her simple daily life he saw
    By homeliest duties tried,
  In all things by an untaught law
    Of fitness justified.

  For her his rank aside he laid;
    He took the hue and tone
  Of lowly life and toil, and made
    Her simple ways his own.

  Yet still, in gay and careless ease,
    To harvest-field or dance
  He brought the gentle courtesies,
    The nameless grace of France.

  And she who taught him love not less
    From him she loved in turn
  Caught in her sweet unconsciousness
    What love is quick to learn.

  Each grew to each in pleased accord,
    Nor knew the gazing town
  If she looked upward to her lord
    Or he to her looked down.