In the closing years of a lengthened life
                With their many and swift mutations

I am sure we are never quite released
                From the old associations

They tug at our hearts, and they draw us back
                To the boyhood days of splendor.

And they love to come when the twilight falls
                With a touch that is sweet and tender.

Then the early pictures are reproduced
                In an endless panorama

And we play our several parts again
                In the old absorbing drama,

Fair valleys and uplands stretch away -
                There are fields and the homes of neighbors

And dark multitudinous ranks of corn
                Are flashing their green-leaf sabers.

I remember the barn with its lofty doors.
                And it’s old storm beaten gables;

With it’s hay-mow dark, where tramps would sleep,
                And the sheds and the teeming stables

How the sleek red cows in the stanchions stood
                Looking grave as a petit Jury;

How the roof of the woodshed traveled off
                In the grip of a tempest’s fury.

I see the pond where we launched and sailed
                Our miniature "ocean liners"

And the meadow brook from whence we took
                The shy little "chubs" and "shiners".

I list the partridge beating his drum
                There’s a hum of bees in the clover

There are V-shaped files of the dark wild geese
                And the blackbirds flying over.

Nearby to the west is a beckoning wood.
                With it’s dim green aisles and shady

Where a Gallant Knight from a dragon fierce
                Might rescue a Beautiful Lady.

The gray fox squirrels run up the trees
                And the orioles and the robins

Have their busy days, in the orchard ways.
                Unreeling their lyric bobbins.

The old house stands on a grassy knoll.
                Where the blossoming locusts cluster,

Its fires are bright and its rooms are warm
                When the Arctic breezes bluster.

All the summer long there is Joy and song
                And the scent of a thousand flowers

With bird conventions every day
                In the vine-hung nooks and bowers.

Up hill and down, like a ribbon gray
                Goes the highway lazily winding.

And a path that leads to the water mill
                Where I rode with the grist for grinding

Have these all changed as I have changed
                In the long years intervening.

Since last I saw from the garden gate
                How the woods and the fields were greening?

I do not know I may never know
                But to me they are fresh and living

As in the years when my life was new
                And my song was a glad thanksgiving

So my thoughts go back to the prairie-land.
                Where the old home farm is lying.

Like a dream of peace in the after-glow
                When the sunset fires are dying.