The Golden Mile-Stone

Leafless are the trees; their purple branches     Spread themselves abroad, like reefs of coral,                 Rising silent     In the Red Sea of the Winter sunset.     From the hundred chimneys of the village,     Like the Afreet in the Arabian story,                 Smoky columns     Tower aloft into the air of amber.     At the window winks the flickering fire-light;     Here and there the lamps of evening glimmer,                 Social watch-fires     Answering one another through the darkness.     On the hearth the lighted logs are glowing,     And like Ariel in the cloven pine-tree                 For its freedom     Groans and sighs the air imprisoned in them.     By the fireside there are old men seated,     Seeing ruined cities in the ashes,                 Asking sadly     Of the Past what it can ne'er restore them.     By the fireside there are youthful dreamers,     Building castles fair, with stately stairways,                 Asking blindly     Of the Future what it cannot give them.     By the fireside tragedies are acted     In whose scenes appear two actors only,                 Wife and husband,     And above them God the sole spectator.     By the fireside there are peace and comfort,     Wives and children, with fair, thoughtful faces,                 Waiting, watching     For a well-known footstep in the passage.     Each man's chimney is his Golden Mile-stone;     Is the central point, from which he measures                 Every distance     Through the gateways of the world around him.     In his farthest wanderings still he sees it;     Hears the talking flame, the answering night-wind,                 As he heard them     When he sat with those who were, but are not.     Happy he whom neither wealth nor fashion,     Nor the march of the encroaching city,                 Drives an exile     From the hearth of his ancestral homestead.     We may build more splendid habitations,     Fill our rooms with paintings and with sculptures,                 But we cannot     Buy with gold the old associations!