The Charcoal-Burner's Hut

Deep in a valley, green with ancient beech,     And wandered through of one small, silent stream,     Whose bear-grassed banks bristled with brush and burr,     Tick-trefoil and the thorny marigold,     Bush-clover and the wahoo, hung with pods,     And mass on mass of bugled jewelweed,     Horsemint and doddered ragweed, dense, unkempt,     I came upon a charcoal-burner's hut,     Abandoned and forgotten long ago;     His hut and weedy pit, where once the wood     Smouldered both day and night like some wild forge,     A wildwood forge, glaring as wild-cat eyes.     A mossy roof, black, fallen in decay,     And rotting logs, exuding sickly mold     And livid fungi, and the tottering wreck,     Rude remnants, of a chimney, clay and sticks,     Were all that now remained to say that once,     In time not so remote, one labored here,     Labored and lived, his world bound by these woods:     A solitary soul whose life was toil,     Toil, grimy and unlovely: sad, recluse,     A life, perhaps, that here went out alone,     Alone and unlamented.     Lost forever,     Haply, somewhere, in some far wilder spot,     Far in the forest, lone as was his life,     A grave, an isolated grave, may mark,     Tangled with cat-brier and the strawberry-bush,     The place he lies in; undistinguishable     From the surrounding forest where the lynx     Whines in the moonlight and the she-fox whelps.     A life as some wood-fungus now forgotten:     The Indian-pipe, or ghost-flower, here that rises     And slowly rots away in autumn rains.     Or, it may be, a comrade carved a line     Of date and death on some old trunk of tree,     Whose letters long ago th' erasing rust     Of moss and gradual growth of drowsy years     Slowly obliterated: or, may be,     The rock, all rudely lettered, like his life,     Set up above him by some kindly hand,     A tree's great, grasping roots have overthrown,     Where lichens long ago effaced his name.