Hillsboro People

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Canfield
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Title: Hillsboro People
Author: Dorothy Canfield
Release Date: August 2, 2004 [EBook #13091]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HILLSBORO
PEOPLE ***
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HILLSBORO
PEOPLE
BY
DOROTHY CANFIELD
AUTHOR OF
THE BENT TWIG, THE SQUIRREL CAGE,
ETC.
WITH OCCASIONAL VERMONT VERSES
BY
SARAH N.
CLEGHORN
1915
CONTENTS
VERMONT (Poem)
HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN (Poem)
AT THE

FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN
PETUNIAS--THAT'S FOR
REMEMBRANCE
THE HEYDAY OF THE BLOOD
AS A
BIRD OUT OF THE SNARE
THE BEDQUILT
PORTRAIT
OF A PHILOSOPHER
FLINT AND FIRE
A SAINT'S HOURS
(Poem)
IN MEMORY OF L.H.W.
IN NEW NEW ENGLAND

THE DELIVERER
NOCTES AMBROSIANAE (Poem)

HILLSBORO'S GOOD LUCK
SALEM HILLS TO ELLIS
ISLAND (Poem)
AVUNCULUS
BY ABANA AND PHARPAR
(Poem)
FINIS
A VILLAGE MUNCHAUSEN
THE ARTIST

WHO ELSE HEARD IT? (Poem)
A DROP IN THE BUCKET

THE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND (Poem)
PIPER TIM

ADESTE FIDELES!
VERMONT
Wide and shallow in the cowslip marshes
Floods the freshet of the April snow.
Late drifts linger in the hemlock
gorges,
Through the brakes and mosses trickling slow
Where the Mayflower,
Where the painted trillium, leaf and blow.
Foliaged deep, the cool midsummer maples
Shade the porches of the
long white street;
Trailing wide, Olympian elms lean over
Tiny churches where the highroads meet.
Fields of fireflies
Wheel all night like stars among the wheat.
Blaze the mountains in the windless autumn
Frost-clear, blue-nooned,
apple-ripening days;
Faintly fragrant in the farther valleys
Smoke of many bonfires swells the haze;
Fair-bound cattle
Plod with lowing up the meadowy ways.

Roaring snows down-sweeping from the uplands
Bury the still
valleys, drift them deep.
Low along the mountain, lake-blue shadows,
Sea-blue shadows in the hollows sleep.
High above them
Blinding crystal is the sunlit steep.
HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN
By orange grove and palm-tree, we walked the southern shore, Each
day more still and golden than was the day before.
That calm and
languid sunshine! How faint it made us grow To look on Hemlock
Mountain when the storm hangs low!
To see its rocky pastures, its sparse but hardy corn, The mist roll off its
forehead before a harvest morn;
To hear the pine-trees crashing
across its gulfs of snow
Upon a roaring midnight when the
whirlwinds blow.
Tell not of lost Atlantis, or fabled Avalon;
The olive, or the vineyard,
no winter breathes upon;
Away from Hemlock Mountain we could
not well forego,
For all the summer islands where the gulf tides flow.
AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN
"In connection with this phase of the problem of transportation it must
be remembered that the rush of population to the great cities was no
temporary movement. It is caused by a final revolt against that
malignant relic of the dark ages, the country village and by a healthy
craving for the deep, full life of the metropolis, for contact with the
vitalizing stream of humanity."--Pritchell's "Handbook of Economics,"
page 247.
Sometimes people from Hillsboro leave our forgotten valley, high
among the Green Mountains, and "go down to the city," as the phrase
runs, They always come back exclaiming that they should think New
Yorkers would just die of lonesomeness, and crying out in an ecstasy of

relief that it does seem so good to get back where there are some folks.
After the desolate isolation of city streets, empty of humanity, filled
only with hurrying ghosts, the vestibule of our church after morning
service fills one with an exalted realization of the great numbers of the
human race. It is like coming into a warmed and lighted room, full of
friendly faces, after wandering long by night in a forest peopled only
with flitting shadows. In the phantasmagoric pantomime of the city, we
forget that there are so many real people in all the world, so diverse, so
unfathomably human as those who meet us in the little post-office on
the night of our return to Hillsboro.
Like any other of those gifts of life which gratify insatiable cravings of
humanity, living in a country village conveys a satisfaction which is
incommunicable. A great many authors have written about it, just as a
great many authors have written about the satisfaction of being in love,
but in the one, as in the other case, the essence of the thing escapes.
People rejoice in sweethearts because all humanity craves love, and
they thrive in country villages because they crave human life. Now the
living spirit of neither of these things can be caught in a net of words.
All the foolish, fond doings of lovers may be set down on paper by
whatever eavesdropper cares to take the trouble, but no one can realize
from that record anything of the glory in the hearts