Was such still dwelling there?

Here are a couple of favorites that Ellie and I
often stroll past on our autumnal peregrinations:

Situated just a few blocks apart, one always reminds me of the other. Not that I've ever lived in -- or even been inside of -- either place, yet the following poems from Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost capture my curiosity to know what these houses may have witnessed over the past century or so:

Emily Dickinson's Home Poem #440

Years I had been from home,
And now, before the door
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business, - just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.

I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before.

I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there.

I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.

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Robert Frost's "Ghost House"

I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me—
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad—
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,—
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.

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As I mentioned a few days ago, here is the house
that represents my all - time fantasy renovation project:

It turns out, upon closer examination,
that several other houses in the vicinity
share a similar, angular, stately style:

The Falley Double

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And these two ~ ABOVE & BELOW ~
that I never fail to admire on the drive
between Lafayette and Indianapolis

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P.S.
These ones also
give me a strangely aching heart.