Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
Bride Brook
By George Parsons Lathrop (18511898)W
And blindly over us there blows
A swarm of years that fill the land,
Then fade, and are as fallen snows.
Or are they years that come between,
When, peering back into the past,
I search the legendary scene?
Fearless of that low rampart’s frown,
The winter’s white-winged, footless host
Beleaguers ancient Saybrook town.
On woods half-buried, white and green,
A smothered world, an empty air:
Never had such deep drifts been seen!
An thou,” said merry Jonathan Rudd,
“Wilt wed me, winter shall depart,
And love like spring for us shall bud.”
Nor minister nor magistrate
Is here, to join us solemnly;
And snow-banks bar us, every gate.”
He laughed. And with the morrow’s sun
He faced the deputy’s dark eyes:
“How soon, sir, may the rite be done?”
Said he. “But at the brook we ’ll meet,
That ripples down the boundary line;
There you may wed, and Heaven shall see ’t.”
Through vistas dreamy with gray light.
The waiting woods, the open plain,
Arrayed in consecrated white,
The very beasts before them fled,
Charmed by the spell of inward song
These lovers’ hearts around them spread.
Bore the maid’s carrying-chair aloft;
She swayed above, as roses nod
On the lithe stem their bloom-weight soft.
With Winthrop and his followers;
The maid in flake-embroidered hood,
The magistrate well cloaked in furs,
Of ample, throat-encircling ruff
As white as some wind-gathered wreath
Of snow quilled into plait and puff.
Eyelids that with the answer fell
Like falling petals,—form that tasked
Brief time;—yet all was wrought, and well!
“Frost’s finger on thy lip makes dumb
The voice wherewith thou shouldst have sped
These lovers on their way; but, come,
By name of her here made a bride;
So shall thy slender music’s moan
Sweeter into the ocean glide!”
Of sunshine quivered through the sky.
Below the ice the unheard stream’s
Clear heart thrilled on in ecstasy;
Stole warmly o’er the voiceless wild,
And in her rapt and wintry hush
The lonely face of Nature smiled.
Is all that tender vision now;
And like lost snow-flakes in the night,
Mute lie the lovers as their vow.
Hast thou thy tender trust forgot?
Her modest memory forsook,
Whose name, known once, thou utterest not?
In willow bough or alder bush
Birds sing, with golden filigree
Of pebbles ’neath the flood’s clear gush;
More than the “Mary.” Men still say
“Bride Brook” in honor of her fame;
But all the rest has passed away.