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Home  »  The Poetical Works In Four Volumes  »  Extract from “A New England Legend”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Narrative and Legendary Poems

Extract from “A New England Legend”

Originally a part of the author’s Moll Pitcher.

HOW has New England’s romance fled,

Even as a vision of the morning!

Its rites foredone, its guardians dead,

Its priestesses, bereft of dread,

Waking the veriest urchin’s scorning!

Gone like the Indian wizard’s yell

And fire-dance round the magic rock,

Forgotten like the Druid’s spell

At moonrise by his holy oak!

No more along the shadowy glen

Glide the dim ghosts of murdered men;

No more the unquiet churchyard dead

Glimpse upward from their turfy bed,

Startling the traveller, late and lone;

As, on some night of starless weather,

They silently commune together,

Each sitting on his own head-stone!

The roofless house, decayed, deserted,

Its living tenants all departed,

No longer rings with midnight revel

Of witch, or ghost, or goblin evil;

No pale blue flame sends out its flashes

Through creviced roof and shattered sashes!

The witch-grass round the hazel spring

May sharply to the night-air sing,

But there no more shall withered hags

Refresh at ease their broomstick nags,

Or taste those hazel-shadowed waters

As beverage meet for Satan’s daughters;

No more their mimic tones be heard,

The mew of cat, the chirp of bird,

Shrill blending with the hoarser laughter

Of the fell demon following after!

The cautious goodman nails no more

A horseshoe on his outer door,

Lest some unseemly hag should fit

To his own mouth her bridle-bit;

The goodwife’s churn no more refuses

Its wonted culinary uses

Until, with heated needle burned,

The witch has to her place returned!

Our witches are no longer old

And wrinkled beldames, Satan-sold,

But young and gay and laughing creatures,

With the heart’s sunshine on their features;

Their sorcery—the light which dances

Where the raised lid unveils its glances;

Or that low-breathed and gentle tone,

The music of Love’s twilight hours,

Soft, dream-like, as a fairy’s moan

Above her nightly closing flowers,

Sweeter than that which sighed of yore

Along the charmed Ausonian shore!

Even she, our own weird heroine,

Sole Pythoness of ancient Lynn,

Sleeps calmly where the living laid her;

And the wide realm of sorcery,

Left by its latest mistress free,

Hath found no gray and skilled invader.

So perished Albion’s “glammarye,”

With him in Melrose Abbey sleeping,

His charmëd torch beside his knee,

That even the dead himself might see

The magic scroll within his keeping.

And now our modern Yankee sees

Nor omens, spells, nor mysteries;

And naught above, below, around,

Of life or death, of sight or sound,

Whate’er its nature, form, or look,

Excites his terror or surprise,—

All seeming to his knowing eyes

Familiar as his “catechise,”

Or “Webster’s Spelling-Book.”

1833.