The man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits, Who has no cares Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone, Close to the bone, And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest.
Where they once dug for money, But never found “ony.”
To market fares With early apples and pears. When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel, I can get enough gravel On the Old Marlborough Road.
If you’ll leave your abode With your fancy unfurled, You may go round the world By the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it, For nobody wears it. It is a living way, As the Christians say. What is it, what is it, But a direction out there And the bare possibility Of going somewhere? Great guide-_boards_ of stone, But travellers none. It is worth going there to see Where you might be. They’re a great endeavor To be something for ever. They are a monument to somebody, To some selectman Who thought of the plan. What king Did the thing, I am still wondering. Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns; Huge as Stonehenge; Set up how or when, By what selectmen? Gourgas or Lee, Clark or Darby? Blank tablets of stone, Where a traveller might groan, And in one sentence Grave all that is known; Which another might read, In his extreme need. I know two or three Sentences, _i. e._, That might there be. Literature that might stand All over the land. Which a man might remember Till after December, And read again in the spring, After the thawing.[50]
Old meeting-house bell, I love thy music well. It peals through the air, Sweetly full and fair, As in the early times, When I listened to its chimes.
I walk over the hills, to compare _great_ things with _small_, as through a gallery of pictures, ever and anon looking through a gap in the wood, as through the frame of a picture, to a more distant wood or hillside, painted with several more coats of air. It is a cheap but pleasant effect. To a landscape in picture, glassed with air.
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It has new life and motion. It is intermediate between land and sky. On land, only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is _rippled_ by the wind. I see the breeze dash across it in streaks and flakes of light. It is somewhat singular that we should _look down_ on the surface of water. We shall look down on the surface of air next, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over _it_.[51]