As aboriginal as rock or tree. 
It nestled close to earth, and seemed to brood
O’er homely thoughts in a half-conscious mood,
As by the peat that rather fades than burns
The smouldering grandam nods and knits by turns, 190
Happy, although her newest news were old
Ere the first hostile drum at Concord rolled. 
If paint it e’er had known, it knew no more
Than yellow lichens spattered thickly o’er
That soft lead-gray, less dark beneath the eaves
Which the slow brush of wind and weather leaves. 
The ample roof sloped backward to the ground,
And vassal lean-tos gathered thickly round,
Patched on, as sire or son had felt the need,
Like chance growths sprouting from the old roofs seed, 200
Just as about a yellow-pine-tree spring
Its rough-barked darlings in a filial ring. 
But the great chimney was the central thought
Whose gravitation through the cluster wrought;
For ’tis not styles far-fetched from Greece or Rome,
But just the Fireside, that can make a home;
None of your spindling things of modern style,
Like pins stuck through to stay the card-built pile,
It rose broad-shouldered, kindly, debonair,
Its warm breath whitening in the October air, 210
While on its front a heart in outline showed
The place it filled in that serene abode.

’When first I chanced the Eagle to explore. 
Ezra sat listless by the open door;
One chair careened him at an angle meet,
Another nursed his hugely slippered feet;
Upon a third reposed a shirt-sleeved arm,
And the whole man diffused tobacco’s charm. 
“Are you the landlord?” “Wahl, I guess I be,”
Watching the smoke he answered leisurely. 220
He was a stoutish man, and through the breast
Of his loose shirt there showed a brambly chest;
Streaked redly as a wind-foreboding morn,
His tanned cheeks curved to temples closely shorn;
Clean-shaved he was, save where a hedge of gray
Upon his brawny throat leaned every way
About an Adam’s-apple, that beneath
Bulged like a boulder from a brambly heath. 
The Western World’s true child and nursling he,
Equipt with aptitudes enough for three:  230
No eye like his to value horse or cow,
Or gauge the contents of a stack or mow;
He could foretell the weather at a word,
He knew the haunt of every beast and bird,
Or where a two-pound trout was sure to lie,
Waiting the flutter of his homemade fly;
Nay, once in autumns five, he had the luck
To drop at fair-play range a ten-tined buck;
Of sportsmen true he favored every whim,
But never cockney found a guide in him; 240
A natural man, with all his instincts fresh,
Not buzzing helpless in Reflection’s mesh,
Firm on its feet stood his broad-shouldered mind,
As bluffly honest as a northwest wind;
Hard-headed and soft-hearted, you’d scarce meet
A kindlier mixture of the shrewd and sweet;
Generous by birth, and ill at saying “No,”
Yet in a bargain he was all men’s foe,
Would yield no inch of vantage in a trade,
And give away ere nightfall all he made. 250