Classic Poem

Once more I came to Sarum Close,
With joy half memory, half desire,
And breathed the sunny wind that rose
And blew the shadows o'er the Spire,
And tossed the lilac's scented plumes,
And swayed the chestnut's thousand cones,
And filled my nostrils with perfumes,
And shaped the clouds in waifs and zones,
And wafted down the serious strain
Of Sarum bells, when, true to time,
I reached the Dean's, with heart and brain
That trembled to the trembling chime.

'Twas half my home, six years ago.
The six years had not altered it:
Red-brick and ashlar, long and low,
With dormers and with oriels lit.
Geranium, lychnis, rose arrayed
The windows, all wide open thrown;
And some one in the Study played
The Wedding-March of Mendelssohn.
And there it was I took leave:
'Twas Christmas: I remembered now
The cruel girls, who feigned to grieve,
Took down the evergreens; and how
The holly into blazes woke
The fire, lighting the large, low room
A dim, rich lustre of old oak
And crimson velvet's glowing gloom.
No change had touched Dean Churchill: kind,
By widowhood more than winters bent,
And settled in a cheerful mind,
As still forecasting heaven's content.
Well might his thoughts be fixed on high,
Now she was there! Within her face
Humility and dignity
Were met in a most sweet embrace.
She seemed expressly sent below
To teach our erring minds to see
The rhythmic change of time's swift flow
As part of still eternity.
Her life, all honour, observed, with awe
Which cross experience could not mar,
The fiction of Christian law
That all men honourable are;
And so her smile at once conferred
High flattery and benign reproof;
And I, a rude boy, strangely stirred,
Grew courtly in my own behoof.
The years, so far from doing her wrong,
Anointed her with gracious balm,
And made her brows more and more young
With wreaths of amaranth and palm.

Was this her eldest, Honor; prude,
Who would not let me pull the swing;
Who, kissed at Christmas, called me rude,
And, sobbing low, refused to sing?
How changed! In shape no slender Grace,
But Venus; milder than the dove;
Her mother's air; her Norman face;
Her large sweet eyes, clear lakes of love.
Mary I knew. In former time
Ailing and pale, she thought that bliss
Was only for a better clime,
And, heavenly overmuch, scorned this.
I, rash with theories of the right,
Which stretched the tether of my Creed,
But did not break it, held delight
Half discipline. We disagreed.
She told the Dean I wanted grace.
Now she was kindest of the three,
And soft wild roses decked her face.
And, what, was this my Mildred, she
To herself and all a sweet surprise?
My Pet, who romped and rolled a hoop?
I wondered where those daisy eyes
Had found their touching curve and droop.

Unmannerly times! But now we sat
Stranger than strangers; till I caught
And answered Mildred's smile; and that
Spread to the rest, and freedom brought.
The Dean talked little, looking on,
Of three such daughters justly vain.
What letters they had had from Bonn,
Said Mildred, and what plums from Spain!
By Honor I was kindly tasked
To excuse my never coming down
From Cambridge; Mary smiled and asked
Were Kant and Goethe yet outgrown?
And, pleased, we talked the old days o'er;
And, parting, I for pleasure sighed.
To be there as a friend, (since more),
Seemed then, seems still, excuse for pride;
For something that abode endued
With temple-like repose, an air
Of life's kind purposes pursued
With ordered freedom sweet and fair.
A tent pitched in a world not right
It seemed, whose inmates, every one,
On tranquil faces bore the light
Of duties beautifully done,
And humbly, though they had few peers,
Kept their own laws, which seemed to be
The fair sum of six thousand years'
Traditions of civility.