With salt sea-scents along its shores The heavy hay-boats crawl, The long antennae of their oars In lazy rise and fall. Along the gray abutment's wall The idle shad-net dries; The toll-man in his cobbler's stall Sits smoking with closed eyes. You hear the pier's low undertone Of waves that chafe and gnaw; You start,--a skipper's horn is blown To raise the creaking draw. At times a blacksmith's anvil sounds With slow and sluggard beat, Or stage-coach on its dusty rounds Fakes up the staring street. A place for idle eyes and ears, A cobwebbed nook of dreams; Left by the stream whose waves are years The stranded village seems. And there, like other moss and rust, The native dweller clings, And keeps, in uninquiring trust, The old, dull round of things. The fisher drops his patient lines, The farmer sows his grain, Content to hear the murmuring pines Instead of railroad-train. Go where, along the tangled steep That slopes against the west, The hamlet's buried idlers sleep In still profounder rest. Throw back the locust's flowery plume, The birch's pale-green scarf, And break the web of brier and bloom From name and epitaph. A simple muster-roll of death, Of pomp and romance shorn, The dry, old names that common breath Has cheapened and outworn. Yet pause by one low mound, and part The wild vines o'er it laced, And read the words by rustic art Upon its headstone traced. Haply yon white-haired villager Of fourscore years can say What means the noble name of her Who sleeps with common clay. An exile from the Gascon land Found refuge here and rest, And loved, of all the village band, Its fairest and its best. He knelt with her on Sabbath morns, He worshipped through her eyes, And on the pride that doubts and scorns Stole in her faith's surprise. Her simple daily life he saw By homeliest duties tried, In all things by an untaught law Of fitness justified. For her his rank aside he laid; He took the hue and tone Of lowly life and toil, and made Her simple ways his own. Yet still, in gay and careless ease, To harvest-field or dance He brought the gentle courtesies, The nameless grace of France. And she who taught him love not less From him she loved in turn Caught in her sweet unconsciousness What love is quick to learn. Each grew to each in pleased accord, Nor knew the gazing town If she looked upward to her lord Or he to her looked down. How sweet, when summer's day was o'er, His violin's mirth and wail, The walk on pleasant Newbury's shore, The river's moonlit sail!