The Old Judge

Around the courthouse corner from the square,
Where Poet Timrod's bust stands in the glare,
There is an ancient office shuttered tight,
With fluted pillars and the paint worn bare.
Seldom, if ever now, do passing feet
Disturb that little, cobbled cul-de-sac
Or rouse dull echoes in the quiet street
Where time has eddied back.
Only the old judge comes,
With quivering hands and thin,
With palsied scraping at the rusty lock
And enters in.
He is the last of all the courtly men,
Those lion-hearts who knew their Montesquieu,
And fought for what he taught them, too,
The STATE was something then —
But now — but now — he seems a very ghost
That haunts the little office off the square,
A Rip Van Winkle of the place at most
At which to stare.

Only on Saturdays he goes,
And no one knows,
And enters by the dusty, blinded door,
And sits and sits
While the long sunlight streams between the slits
And the rats scurry underneath the floor.
And there he stays all afternoon;
The wagons rumble in the square,
And the cracked, plaster bust of grim Calhoun
Frowns with its classic stare.
What dreams are these, old judge, of the old days,
When cotton bales made mountains on the ways,
When clipper ships were loading at the quays —
Or statelier, courtlier times of ease
And manners without flaw,
When Smythe & Pringle ,
The name is all but weathered from the shingle,
Were the state's foremost firm at law.

Aye! Those were times!
They leap to life among the steeple chimes,
A passion and a white tone in the bells
Flatters his sleep until he dreams of bout
And rapier thrust at law —
Of frosty marches,
Camp fires and faces of dead men,
The War,
And old Virginia's academic arches —
And he is young again!
Oh! Life! Oh! Glory!
He leaps up from his seat —
Ah! Judge, the old, old story;
The blood can scarcely creep
Back to the icy feet
As the old man startles from his sleep,
The last bell hums and then —
Memento mori!

Dream, dream, old judge,
May quiet bring you ease,
Among the Wedgwood phantoms of old Greece,
Dream while the carved lambs in the frieze
Trot to the voiceless sound
Of Pan-pipes in the Georgian mantelpiece,
Summon the forms of men you used to know;
Till dead men's footfalls creak across the floor —
Is it your partner's who once long ago
Planted the brick court with rêve d'or?
Ah! He is gone now with his roses,
Gone these thirty years and more.

And now the new South quickens, in the square
The huge trucks thunder and the motors blare.
The park oaks droop with Spanish moss and age,
The jedge no longer now is marss but boss ,
And all the old things suffer change and loss
But still he makes his weekly pilgrimage.
Some day, some waif will look in through the pane
And see him sitting with his gold-head cane
With wide unseeing eyes a-stare —
Then there will be an end of dreams and care,
A courtesy will pass we cannot spare,
And humor, sparkling, dry as old champagne.