The Old Brick School House on the green,
With its pyramid roof and windows high,
And the sentinel poplars, tall and lean,
That seemed to my fancy and boyish eye,
Standing up stiffly and brushing the sky
As a trooper’s plume is seen, –
I figure them still as I saunter by,
Though house and trees, and the green itself,
Have gone at the touch of Time, the elf;
Who leaves, for old things laid on the shelf,
Only new ones, — and a sigh!
How the bolt-up benches were hacked and hewn
By the Yankee jack-knife’s hungry edge,
Into scarp, transverse, and demi-lune;
What sculptured names on the window-ledge,
And beetle-head profiles, with nose for a wedge,
Just splitting a carvéd moon!
And how the dear dumpies, with legs too short,
Hung on the fore-forms perilous perch,
With nothing to touch on the back, but the birch,
And nothing below to recover a lurch,
But the far-floor futilely sought!
There were gaps int he wall and a crack round the door,
Where the wind would come and whistle in school,
And gaps in the all-æolian floor,
To serve, as the head broiled more and more,
To keep us the dear feet cool!
And the wood would fall in stormy days,
So only the boist’rous boys could stay;
With logs and laths in a roaring blaze,
To warm the house we would nearly raze,
In the other sense, with our tearing plays,
Through the howling of gale(y) day.
The fire-place, which had long subdued
The ardor of fuel to “latent heat,”
For the stubborn rebel, hot and rude,
Proved most, for a cooling dungeon meet.
While the huge stove-pipe, – an iron street,
Or Menal bridge, pursued.
By the haunting notion a fall would soot.
The boys below as a striking joke,
Would slip its joints like a crab, and do’t,
Scorching the fingers put rashly to’t.
While fire and boys rushed out with a hoot,
And the whole thing ended in smoke!
There were noble boys and fairy girls,
Whom now I see through the haze of years
As through that smoke’s voluminous curls, –
My eyes repeating the same old tears,
Though moving far in their sundered spheres
Their chequered web unfurls;
Some plant new States in the stately West,
Some plant potatoes and onions here;
Some rock their little ones on the breast,
And some, if less happy perchance as blest,
Over the bed of a darling’s rest
Are dropping a mother’s tear.
We’ve a new brick schoolhouse, stiff and tall,
The front three-legged with columns white,
And elbowed into the street by a wall;
While squash and cabbage usurp the site
Of the former, as if there by right, –
The old heads done in small!
But sooth if I were a boy, as then,
I would long to see the old hut back;
My heart would sigh for each dear old crack,
And my jack-knife burn for a place to hack,
Though for hacking it burned again.
