Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.
Dorchester Hills
By John Kenyon (1784–1856)W
They tower to no such height as looks with scorn
Over a dwindled plain; what though no crags
Be there to fortify; no forest belts
To gird them midway round; yet theirs, instead,
Are graceful slopes with shadowy dips between,
And theirs are breezy summits, not too high
To recognize familiar sights, and catch
Familiar sounds of life,—the ploughman’s call,
Or tinkling from the fold. Yet thence the eye
Feeds on no stinted landscape, sky and earth
And the blue sea; and thence may wingéd thought,
Which ever loves the vantage-ground of hills,
Launch amid buoyant air, and soar at will.
In some far time, for some forgotten cause,
Named of the Maiden. Nor doth surer lore
Attest if Briton or if Roman wound
These triple trenches round thee; regular
As terraces, by architect upbuilt
For princely pleasure-ground, or those, far-famed,
By ancient hunters made—so some have deemed—
Or else by Nature’s self in wild Glenroy.
Along thy sides they stretch, ring above ring,
Marking thee from afar; then vanish round
Like the broad shingly banks which ocean heaves
In noble curves along his winding shore.
The passing wayfarer with wonder views,
E’en at imperfect distance, their bold lines,
And asks the who, the wherefore, and the when;
Wafting his spirit back into far times,
And dreaming as he goes. But whoso stays,
And climbs the turf-way to thy tabled top,
Shall reap a fuller wonder; shall behold
Thy girdled area, of itself a plain,
Where widely feeds the scattered flock; shall mark
Thy trenches, complicate with warlike art,
And deep almost as natural ravine
Cut in the mountain; or some startling rent
In the blue-gleaming glacier; or as clefts,
Severing the black and jagged lava-walls,
Which old Vesuvius round his crater flings,—
Outworks, to guard the mysteries within.
But these are smooth and verdant. Tamed long since,
Breastwork abrupt and palisaded mound
Are, now, but sloping greensward; as if Nature,
Who vainly her mild moral reads to man,
Still strove to realize the blessed days,
By seers avouched, by statesmen turned to dreams,
When war shall be no more.
So mused I there!
As who had failed to muse? But now the sun,
Silently sunken, with departing light
Had fused the whole horizon; not alone
His western realm, but flooded refluent gold
Back to the southern hills, along whose tops
Are seen to stretch, in far continuous line,
Sepulchral barrows. Brightly-verdant cones
I marked them rise beneath his earlier ray;
But now they stood against that orange light
Each of a velvet blackness, like the bier
Before some high-illumined altar spread
When a king lies in state; and well might seem
To twilight fantasy like funeral palls,
Shrouding the bones of aboriginal men,
Who there had lived and died, long ere our tribes
Had heard the name or felt the conquering arms
Of Rome or Roman; or as yet had seen,
Mocking their hearths of clay and turf-built huts,
The prætor’s quaint mosaic or tiled bath;
Or heard our hard school-task, the phrase of Terence
Bandied in common parlance round the land.