Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.

New England: Waverly, Mass.

Beaver Brook

By James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

HUSHED with broad sunlight lies the hill,

And, minuting the long day’s loss,

The cedar’s shadow, slow and still,

Creeps o’er its dial of gray moss.

Warm noon brims full the valley’s cup.

The aspen’s leaves are scarce astir;

Only the little mill sends up

Its busy, never-ceasing burr.

Climbing the loose-piled wall that hems

The road along the mill-pond’s brink,

From ’neath the arching barberry-stems,

My footstep scares the shy chewink.

Beneath a bony buttonwood

The mill’s red door lets forth the din;

The whitened miller, dust-imbued,

Flits past the square of dark within.

No mountain torrent’s strength is here;

Sweet Beaver, child of forest still,

Heaps its small pitcher to the ear,

And gently waits the miller’s will.

Swift slips Undine along the race

Unheard, and then, with flashing bound,

Floods the dull wheel with light and grace,

And, laughing, hunts the loath drudge round.

The miller dreams not at what cost

The quivering millstones hum and whirl,

Nor how for every turn are tost

Armfuls of diamond and of pearl.

But Summer cleared my happier eyes

With drops of some celestial juice,

To see how Beauty underlies

Forevermore each form of Use.

And more: methought I saw that flood,

Which now so dull and darkling steals,

Thick, here and there, with human blood,

To turn the world’s laborious wheels.

No more than doth the miller there,

Shut in our several cells, do we

Know with what waste of beauty rare

Moves every day’s machinery.

Surely the wiser time shall come

When this fine overplus of might,

No longer sullen, slow, and dumb,

Shall leap to music and to light.

In that new childhood of the Earth

Life of itself shall dance and play,

Fresh blood in Time’s shrunk veins make mirth,

And labor meet delight half-way.