C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
The Windmill
By Emile Verhaeren (18551916)
T
Since dawn its arms—pleading, reproachful—have stretched out and fallen; and now again they fall, far off in the darkening air and absolute silence of extinguished nature.
Sick with winter, the day drowses to sleep upon the villages; the clouds are weary of their gloomy travels; and along the copses where shadows are gathering, the wheel-tracks fade away to a dead horizon. Some cabins of beech logs squat miserably in a circle about a colorless pond; a copper lamp hangs from the ceiling and throws a patina of fire over wall and window. And in the immense plain, by the side of the sleeping stream—wretched, miserable hovels!—they fix, with the poor eyes of their ragged window-panes, the old windmill which turns, and—weary—turns and dies.