Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.
Silchester
By John Kenyon (17841856)M
At length I view thee, hoary Silchester!
Pilgrim long vowed; now only hither led,
As with new zeal by fervent Mitford fed,
Whose voice of poesy and classic grace
Had breathed a new religion on the place.
Of our metropolis, a later Rome,
How sweet to win one calm, uncrowded day,
Where congregated man hath passed away!
Are but the girdle now of rural ground;
These stones from far-off fields, toil-gathered thence
For man’s protection, but a farm’s ring-fence;
The fruit of all his planning and his pain
By Nature’s certain hand resumed again!
May learn from crossing lines of stunted grass,
And stunted wheat-stems, that refuse to grow,
What intersecting causeways sleep below.
And ploughshare, deeplier delving on its path,
Will oft break in on pavement quaint or bath;
Or flax-haired little one, from neighboring cot,
Will hap on rusted coin, she knows not what;
’Bout which, though grave collectors make great stir,
Some pretty pebble found had more contented her.
Hoarse caws the rook, and redbreast carols clear;
All silent else! nor human foot nor call
Are heard to-day within its turfy wall;
Gone—many a century since—its shouts, its shows;
Here thought may now hold commune with repose.
Than tinged these walls two thousand years ago;
While leaves, e’en such as then in autumn fell,
Twirling adown with faint decaying smell,
Mix with the pensive thoughts of ruin well.
Rose they, Stonehenge! coevally with thee,
Whose years, in prose untold or Druid-rhyme,
Still baffle thought,—the riddle of old Time?
Or was it Rome first fixed to fortify
This pleasant spot? deserted when? or why?
What name, familiar to historic ear,
Ruled this hill-circled track, Proconsul here;
And master of these fields, though fair they be,
Sighed for his sunny vines beyond the Tyrrhene sea?
Was the oak worshipped in yon sloping wood?
And did each creed, as creeds are wont to do,
The other scorn, and hold itself the true?
These flinty nodules fashioned, thus to be
Ruin or rock, as each—a mystery!
Scanning these flints, ’t was “Castrum Silicis.”
My books away, I vouch not how it is;
For heavy tomes of antiquarian lore
Burden the traveller much, if reader more.
Speak, ancient bulwarks! your own story speak:
Vexed heretofore by dilettanti lungs,
How often have I wished that stones had tongues!
Perchance of Latin blood, yon shepherd old,
Himself a crumbling ruin of fourscore?
“The Romish folk,” he says, “dwelt here of yore”;
’T is all he knows,—the learned scarce know more.
If knowledge or if mystery please the most.