Chapter IX

Fallen is the leafage from above
That covered all the garden with its shade;
See, between the naked boughs far off
The village roofs to the horizon fade.

While summer flamed its joy, neither of us
Saw them clustered there so near our home;
But to-day, with leaf and flower dead,
Into our thinking they more often come.

Others are living there behind those walls
And those worn thresholds with the porch above,
Having for only friends the wind and rain
And the lighted lamp to give them love.

In the fall of eve, when fires are lit,
And the pauses of the clock they heed,
Dear, as to us, the silence is to them,
The thoughts within their eyes that they may read.

Those hours of intimacy naught disturbs,
Of tender and profound tranquillity,
Blessing the instant past for having been
And finding dearer yet the one to be.

See how they hold between their trembling hands
A happiness of pain and pleasure born;
Known to each the other's body old
And aged eyes by the same sorrows worn.

The flowers of their life, they love them faded,
The final perfume and the beauty brief,
And heavy memory of glory waning,
Wasting in time's garden, leaf by leaf.

Deep in their warmth of human feeling hid,
From the winter sheltered and reduse,
Nothing abases them or makes them pine
And plead for days they are content to lose.

The quiet folk of those old villages,
What neighbours are they to our happiness!
And how we find our own tears in their eyes,
Our strength and ardour in their fearlessness!

Down there, beneath their roofs, by windowside
Or seated by the glowing fireside, thus,
Perhaps on such a night of wind and wet,
What we have thought of them they think of us.