Classic Poem

The cobwebs close are pencils of meal,
Painting the beams unsound,
And the bubbles varnish the glittering wheel
As it rumbles round and round.
Then the Brook began to talk
And the water found a tongue,
" We have danced a long dance, " said the gossip,
" A long way have we danced and sung. "

" Rocked in a cradle of sanded stone
Our waters wavered ages alone,
Then glittered at the spring
On whose banks the feather-ferns cling;
Down jagged ravines
We fled tortured,
And our wild eddies nurtured
Their black hemlock screens;
And o'er the soft meadows we rippled along,
And soothed their lone hours with a pensive song, —
Now at this mill we're plagued to stop,
To let our miller grind the crop.

" See the clumsy farmers come
With jolting wagons far from home;
We grind their grist,
It wearied a season to raise,
Weeks of sunlight and weeks of mist,
Days for the drudge and Holydays.
To me it fatal seems,
Thus to kill a splendid summer,
And cover a landscape of dreams
In the acre of work and not murmur.
I could lead them where berries grew,
Sweet flag-root and gentian blue,
And they will not come and laugh with me,
Where my water sings in its joyful glee;
Yet small the profit, and short-lived for them,
Blown from Fate's whistle like flecks of steam.

" The old mill counts a few short years, —
Ever my rushing water steers!
It glazed the starving Indian's red,
On despair or pumpkin fed,
And oceans of turtle notched ere he came,
Species consumptive to Latin and fame,
(Molluscous dear or orphan fry,
Sweet to Nature, I know not why).

" Thoughtful critics say that I
From yon mill-dam draw supply. —
I cap the scornful Alpine heads,
Amazons and seas have beds,
But I am their trust and lord.
Me ye quaff by bank and board,
Me ye pledge the iron-horse,
I float Lowells in my source.

" The farmers lug their bags and say, —
" Neighbor, wilt thou grind the grist to-day?"
Grind it with his nervous thumbs!
Clap his aching shells behind it,
Crush it into crumbs!

" No! his dashboards from the wood
Hum the dark pine's solitude;
Fractious teeth are of the quarry
That I crumble in a hurry, —
Far-fetched duty is to me
To turn this old wheel carved of a tree.

" I like the maples on my side,
Dead leaves, the darting trout;
Laconic rocks (they sometime put me out)
And moon or stars that ramble with my tide;
The polished air, I think I could abide.

" This selfish race who prove me,
Who use, but do not love me!
Their undigested meal
Pays not my labor on the wheel.
I better like the sparrow
Who sips a drop at morn,
Than the men who vex my marrow,
To grind their cobs and corn. "

Then said I to my brook, " Thy manners mend!
Thou art a tax on earth for me to spend. "