The Dead House
“I have a notion that the inmates of a house should never be changed. When the first occupants go out it should be burned, and a stone set up with ‘Sacred to the Memory of a Home’ on it. Suppose the body were eternal, and that when one spirit went out another took the lease. How frightful the strange expression of the eyes would be! I fancy sometimes that the look in the eyes of a familiar house changes when aliens have come into it. For certainly a dwelling adapts itself to its occupants. The front door of a hospitable man opens easily and looks broad, and you can read Welcome! on every step that leads to it.
“I stopped there and tried to put that into verse. I have only half succeeded, and I shall not give it to you. I shall copy it and thrust it into Jane's letter.” J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, August 31, 1858.
A similar fancy appears in an earlier letter to Mrs. Francis G. Shaw, to whom Lowell wrote January 11, 1853: “I spent Sunday with Edmund Qumcy at Dedham, and, as I came back over the rail yesterday, I was roused from a reverie by seeing ‘West Roxbury Station’ written up over the door of a kind of Italian villa at which we stopped. I almost twisted my head off looking for the house on the hill. There it stood in mourning still, just as Frank painted it. The color suited my mood exactly. The eyes of the house were shut, the welcoming look it had was gone; it was dead. I am a Platonist about houses. They get to my eye a shape from the souls that inhabit them. My friends' dwellings seem as peculiar to them as their bodies, looks, and motions. People have no right to sell their dead houses; they should burn them as they used to burn corpses. . . . I have buried that house now and flung my pious handful of earth over it and set up a headstone—and I shall never look up to the hill-top again, let me pass it never so often.”
Here once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And welcome thrilled from the threshold
To the foot it had known before.
A glow came forth to meet me
From the flame that laughed in the grate,
And shadows adance on the ceiling,
Danced blither with mine for a mate.
“I claim you, old friend,” yawned the arm chair,
“This corner, you know, is your seat;”
“Rest your slippers on me,” beamed the fender,
“I brighten at touch of your feet.”
“We know the practised finger,”
Said the books, “that seems like brain;”
And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.
Sang the pillow, “My down once quivered
On nightingales' throats that flew
Through moonlit gardens of Hafiz
To gather quaint dreams for you.”
Ah me, where the Past sowed heart's-ease,
The Present plucks rue for us men!
I come back: that scar unhealing
Was not in the churchyard then.
But, I think, the house is unaltered,
I will go and beg to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to a brook.
Unaltered! Alas for the sameness
That makes the change but more!
'T is a dead man I see in the mirrors,
'T is his tread that chills the floor!
To learn such a simple lesson,
Need I go to Paris and Rome,
That the many make the household,
But only one the home?
'T was just a womanly presence,
An influence unexprest,
But a rose she had worn, on my grave-sod
Were more than long life with the rest!
'T was a smile, 't was a garment's rustle,
'T was nothing that I can phrase,
But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,
And put on her looks and ways.
Were it mine I would close the shutters,
Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a home that is dead.
For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark on the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.
“I have a notion that the inmates of a house should never be changed. When the first occupants go out it should be burned, and a stone set up with ‘Sacred to the Memory of a Home’ on it. Suppose the body were eternal, and that when one spirit went out another took the lease. How frightful the strange expression of the eyes would be! I fancy sometimes that the look in the eyes of a familiar house changes when aliens have come into it. For certainly a dwelling adapts itself to its occupants. The front door of a hospitable man opens easily and looks broad, and you can read Welcome! on every step that leads to it.
“I stopped there and tried to put that into verse. I have only half succeeded, and I shall not give it to you. I shall copy it and thrust it into Jane's letter.” J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, August 31, 1858.
A similar fancy appears in an earlier letter to Mrs. Francis G. Shaw, to whom Lowell wrote January 11, 1853: “I spent Sunday with Edmund Qumcy at Dedham, and, as I came back over the rail yesterday, I was roused from a reverie by seeing ‘West Roxbury Station’ written up over the door of a kind of Italian villa at which we stopped. I almost twisted my head off looking for the house on the hill. There it stood in mourning still, just as Frank painted it. The color suited my mood exactly. The eyes of the house were shut, the welcoming look it had was gone; it was dead. I am a Platonist about houses. They get to my eye a shape from the souls that inhabit them. My friends' dwellings seem as peculiar to them as their bodies, looks, and motions. People have no right to sell their dead houses; they should burn them as they used to burn corpses. . . . I have buried that house now and flung my pious handful of earth over it and set up a headstone—and I shall never look up to the hill-top again, let me pass it never so often.”
Here once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And welcome thrilled from the threshold
To the foot it had known before.
A glow came forth to meet me
From the flame that laughed in the grate,
And shadows adance on the ceiling,
Danced blither with mine for a mate.
“I claim you, old friend,” yawned the arm chair,
“This corner, you know, is your seat;”
“Rest your slippers on me,” beamed the fender,
“I brighten at touch of your feet.”
“We know the practised finger,”
Said the books, “that seems like brain;”
And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.
Sang the pillow, “My down once quivered
On nightingales' throats that flew
Through moonlit gardens of Hafiz
To gather quaint dreams for you.”
Ah me, where the Past sowed heart's-ease,
The Present plucks rue for us men!
I come back: that scar unhealing
Was not in the churchyard then.
But, I think, the house is unaltered,
I will go and beg to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to a brook.
Unaltered! Alas for the sameness
That makes the change but more!
'T is a dead man I see in the mirrors,
'T is his tread that chills the floor!
To learn such a simple lesson,
Need I go to Paris and Rome,
That the many make the household,
But only one the home?
'T was just a womanly presence,
An influence unexprest,
But a rose she had worn, on my grave-sod
Were more than long life with the rest!
'T was a smile, 't was a garment's rustle,
'T was nothing that I can phrase,
But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,
And put on her looks and ways.
Were it mine I would close the shutters,
Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a home that is dead.
For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark on the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.
“I stopped there and tried to put that into verse. I have only half succeeded, and I shall not give it to you. I shall copy it and thrust it into Jane's letter.” J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, August 31, 1858.
A similar fancy appears in an earlier letter to Mrs. Francis G. Shaw, to whom Lowell wrote January 11, 1853: “I spent Sunday with Edmund Qumcy at Dedham, and, as I came back over the rail yesterday, I was roused from a reverie by seeing ‘West Roxbury Station’ written up over the door of a kind of Italian villa at which we stopped. I almost twisted my head off looking for the house on the hill. There it stood in mourning still, just as Frank painted it. The color suited my mood exactly. The eyes of the house were shut, the welcoming look it had was gone; it was dead. I am a Platonist about houses. They get to my eye a shape from the souls that inhabit them. My friends' dwellings seem as peculiar to them as their bodies, looks, and motions. People have no right to sell their dead houses; they should burn them as they used to burn corpses. . . . I have buried that house now and flung my pious handful of earth over it and set up a headstone—and I shall never look up to the hill-top again, let me pass it never so often.”
Here once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And welcome thrilled from the threshold
To the foot it had known before.
A glow came forth to meet me
From the flame that laughed in the grate,
And shadows adance on the ceiling,
Danced blither with mine for a mate.
“I claim you, old friend,” yawned the arm chair,
“This corner, you know, is your seat;”
“Rest your slippers on me,” beamed the fender,
“I brighten at touch of your feet.”
“We know the practised finger,”
Said the books, “that seems like brain;”
And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.
Sang the pillow, “My down once quivered
On nightingales' throats that flew
Through moonlit gardens of Hafiz
To gather quaint dreams for you.”
Ah me, where the Past sowed heart's-ease,
The Present plucks rue for us men!
I come back: that scar unhealing
Was not in the churchyard then.
But, I think, the house is unaltered,
I will go and beg to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to a brook.
Unaltered! Alas for the sameness
That makes the change but more!
'T is a dead man I see in the mirrors,
'T is his tread that chills the floor!
To learn such a simple lesson,
Need I go to Paris and Rome,
That the many make the household,
But only one the home?
'T was just a womanly presence,
An influence unexprest,
But a rose she had worn, on my grave-sod
Were more than long life with the rest!
'T was a smile, 't was a garment's rustle,
'T was nothing that I can phrase,
But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,
And put on her looks and ways.
Were it mine I would close the shutters,
Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a home that is dead.
For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark on the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.
“I have a notion that the inmates of a house should never be changed. When the first occupants go out it should be burned, and a stone set up with ‘Sacred to the Memory of a Home’ on it. Suppose the body were eternal, and that when one spirit went out another took the lease. How frightful the strange expression of the eyes would be! I fancy sometimes that the look in the eyes of a familiar house changes when aliens have come into it. For certainly a dwelling adapts itself to its occupants. The front door of a hospitable man opens easily and looks broad, and you can read Welcome! on every step that leads to it.
“I stopped there and tried to put that into verse. I have only half succeeded, and I shall not give it to you. I shall copy it and thrust it into Jane's letter.” J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, August 31, 1858.
A similar fancy appears in an earlier letter to Mrs. Francis G. Shaw, to whom Lowell wrote January 11, 1853: “I spent Sunday with Edmund Qumcy at Dedham, and, as I came back over the rail yesterday, I was roused from a reverie by seeing ‘West Roxbury Station’ written up over the door of a kind of Italian villa at which we stopped. I almost twisted my head off looking for the house on the hill. There it stood in mourning still, just as Frank painted it. The color suited my mood exactly. The eyes of the house were shut, the welcoming look it had was gone; it was dead. I am a Platonist about houses. They get to my eye a shape from the souls that inhabit them. My friends' dwellings seem as peculiar to them as their bodies, looks, and motions. People have no right to sell their dead houses; they should burn them as they used to burn corpses. . . . I have buried that house now and flung my pious handful of earth over it and set up a headstone—and I shall never look up to the hill-top again, let me pass it never so often.”
Here once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And welcome thrilled from the threshold
To the foot it had known before.
A glow came forth to meet me
From the flame that laughed in the grate,
And shadows adance on the ceiling,
Danced blither with mine for a mate.
“I claim you, old friend,” yawned the arm chair,
“This corner, you know, is your seat;”
“Rest your slippers on me,” beamed the fender,
“I brighten at touch of your feet.”
“We know the practised finger,”
Said the books, “that seems like brain;”
And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.
Sang the pillow, “My down once quivered
On nightingales' throats that flew
Through moonlit gardens of Hafiz
To gather quaint dreams for you.”
Ah me, where the Past sowed heart's-ease,
The Present plucks rue for us men!
I come back: that scar unhealing
Was not in the churchyard then.
But, I think, the house is unaltered,
I will go and beg to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to a brook.
Unaltered! Alas for the sameness
That makes the change but more!
'T is a dead man I see in the mirrors,
'T is his tread that chills the floor!
To learn such a simple lesson,
Need I go to Paris and Rome,
That the many make the household,
But only one the home?
'T was just a womanly presence,
An influence unexprest,
But a rose she had worn, on my grave-sod
Were more than long life with the rest!
'T was a smile, 't was a garment's rustle,
'T was nothing that I can phrase,
But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,
And put on her looks and ways.
Were it mine I would close the shutters,
Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a home that is dead.
For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark on the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.
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