Classic Poem

I

Come, children, put your baskets down,
And let the blushing berries be;
Sit here and wreathe a laurel crown,
And if I win it, give it me.

'T is afternoon — it is July —
The mountain shadows grow and grow;
Your time of rest, and mine is nigh —
The moon was rising long ago.

While yet on old Chocorua's top
The lingering sunlight says farewell,
Your purple-fingered labor stop,
And hear a tale I have to tell.

II

You see that cottage in the glen,
Yon desolate, forsaken shed,
Whose mouldering threshold, now and then,
Only a few stray travelers tread.

No smoke is curling from its roof,
At eve no cattle gather round,
No neighbor now, with dint of hoof,
Prints his glad visit on the ground.

A happy home it was of yore:
At morn the flocks went nibbling by,
And Farmer Willey, at his door,
Oft made their reckoning with his eye.

Where you rank alder-trees have sprung,
And birches cluster, thick and tall,
Once the stout apple overhung,
With his red gifts, the orchard wall.

Right fond and pleasant in their ways
The gentle Willey people were;
I knew them in those peaceful days,
And Mary — every one knew her.

III

Two summers now had seared the hills,
Two years of little rain or dew;
High up the courses of the rills
The wild-rose and the raspberry grew:

The mountain sides were cracked and dry,
And frequent fissures on the plain,
Like mouths, gaped open to the sky,
As though the parched earth prayed for rain.

One sultry August afternoon,
Old Willey, looking toward the west,
Said, " We shall hear the thunder soon:
Oh! if it bring us rain, 't is blest. "

And even with his word, a smell
Of sprinkled fields passed through the air,
And from a single cloud there fell
A few large drops — the rain was there.

Ere set of sun a thunder-stroke
Gave signal to the floods to rise;
Then the great seal of heaven was broke,
Then burst the gates that barred the skies!

While from the west the clouds rolled on,
And from the nor'west gathered fast,
" We'll have enough of rain anon, "
Said Willey, " if this deluge last. "

For all these cliffs that stand sublime
Around, like solemn priests appeared,
Gray Druids of the olden time,
Each with his white and streaming beard,

Till in one sheet of seething foam
The mingled torrents joined their might;
But in the Willeys' quiet home
Was naught but silence and " Good-night! "

For soon they went to their repose,
And in their beds, all safe and warm,
Saw not how fast the waters rose,
Heard not the growing of the storm.

But just before the stroke of ten,
Old Willey looked into the night,
And called upon his two hired men,
And woke his wife, who struck a light,

Though her hand trembled, as she heard
The horses whinnying in the stall,
And — " Children! " was the only word
That woman from her lips let fall.

" Mother! " the frightened infants cried,
" What is it? has a whirlwind come? "
Wildly the weeping mother eyed
Each little darling, but was dumb.

A sound! as though a mighty gale
Some forest from its hold had riven,
Mixed with a rattling noise like hail!
God! art Thou raining rocks from heaven?

A flash! O Christ! the lightning showed
The mountain moving from his seat!
Out! out into the slippery road!
Into the wet with naked feet!

No time for dress, — for life! for life!
No time for any word but this.
The father grasped his boys, his wife
Snatched her young babe, — but not to kiss.

And Mary with the younger girl,
Barefoot and shivering in their smocks,
Sped forth amid that angry whirl
Of rushing waves and whelming rocks,

For down the mountain's crumbling side,
Full half the mountain from on high
Came sinking, like the snows that slide
From the great Alps about July.

And with it went the lordly ash,
And with it went the kingly pine;
Cedar and oak, amid the crash,
Dropped down like clippings of the vine.

Two rivers rushed, — the one that broke
His wonted bounds and drowned the land,
And one that streamed with dust and smoke,
A flood of earth, of stones and sand.

Then for a time the vale was dry,
The soil had swallowed up the wave;
Till one star, looking from the sky,
A signal to the tempest gave:

The clouds withdrew, the storm was o'er,
Bright Aldebaran burned again;
The buried river rose once more,
And foamed along his gravelly glen.

IV

At noon the men of Conway felt
Some dreadful thing had chanced that night,
And those by Breton woods who dwelt
Observed the mountain's altered height.

Old Crawford and the Fabyan lad
Came down from Ammonoosue then,
And passed the Notch, — ah! strange and sad
It was to see the ravaged glen.

But having toiled for miles, in doubt,
With many a risk of limb and neck,
They saw, and hailed with joyful shout
The Willey House amid the wreck.

That avalanche of stones and sand,
Remembering mercy in its wrath,
Had parted, and on either hand
Pursued the ruin of its path.

And there upon its pleasant slope,
The cottage, like a sunny isle
That wakes the shipwrecked seaman's hope,
Amid that horror seemed to smile.

And still upon the lawn before,
The peaceful sheep were nibbling nigh;
But Farmer Willey at his door
Stood not to count them with his eye.

And in the dwelling — O despair!
The silent room! the vacant bed!
The children's little shoes were there —
But whither were the children fled?

That day a woman's head, all gashed,
Its long hair streaming in the flow,
Went o'er the dam, and then was dashed
Among the whirlpools down below.

And farther down, by Saco side,
They found the mangled forms of four,
Held in an eddy of the tide;
But Mary, she was seen no more.

Yet never to this mournful vale
Shall any maid, in Summer time,
Come without thinking of the tale
I now have told you in my rhyme.

And when the Willey House is gone,
And its last rafter is decayed,
Its history may yet live on
In this your ballad that I made.