Poems of Nature, part 4, Snow Bound etc | Page 5

while in life's late afternoon,?Where cool and long the shadows grow,?I walk to meet the night that soon?Shall shape and shadow overflow,?I cannot feel that thou art far,?Since near at need the angels are;?And when the sunset gates unbar,?Shall I not see thee waiting stand,?And, white against the evening star,?The welcome of thy beckoning hand?
Brisk wielder of the birch and rule,?The master of the district school?Held at the fire his favored place,?Its warm glow lit a laughing face?Fresh-hued and fair, where scarce appeared?The uncertain prophecy of beard.?He teased the mitten-blinded cat,?Played cross-pins on my uncle's hat,?Sang songs, and told us what befalls?In classic Dartmouth's college halls.?Born the wild Northern hills among,?From whence his yeoman father wrung?By patient toil subsistence scant,?Not competence and yet not want,
He early gained the power to pay?His cheerful, self-reliant way;?Could doff at ease his scholar's gown?To peddle wares from town to town;?Or through the long vacation's reach?In lonely lowland districts teach,?Where all the droll experience found?At stranger hearths in boarding round,?The moonlit skater's keen delight,?The sleigh-drive through the frosty night,?The rustic party, with its rough?Accompaniment of blind-man's-buff,?And whirling plate, and forfeits paid,?His winter task a pastime made.?Happy the snow-locked homes wherein?He tuned his merry violin,?Or played the athlete in the barn,?Or held the good dame's winding-yarn,?Or mirth-provoking versions told?Of classic legends rare and old,?Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome?Had all the commonplace of home,?And little seemed at best the odds?'Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods;?Where Pindus-born Arachthus took?The guise of any grist-mill brook,?And dread Olympus at his will?Became a huckleberry hill.
A careless boy that night be seemed;?But at his desk he had the look?And air of one who wisely schemed,?And hostage from the future took?In trained thought and lore of book.?Large-brained, clear-eyed, of such as he?Shall Freedom's young apostles be,?Who, following in War's bloody trail,?Shall every lingering wrong assail;?All chains from limb and spirit strike,?Uplift the black and white alike;?Scatter before their swift advance?The darkness and the ignorance,?The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth,?Which nurtured Treason's monstrous growth,?Made murder pastime, and the hell?Of prison-torture possible;?The cruel lie of caste refute,?Old forms remould, and substitute?For Slavery's lash the freeman's will,?For blind routine, wise-handed skill;?A school-house plant on every hill,?Stretching in radiate nerve-lines thence?The quick wires of intelligence;?Till North and South together brought?Shall own the same electric thought,?In peace a common flag salute,?And, side by side in labor's free?And unresentful rivalry,?Harvest the fields wherein they fought.
Another guest that winter night?Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light.?Unmarked by time, and yet not young,?The honeyed music of her tongue?And words of meekness scarcely told?A nature passionate and bold,?Strong, self-concentred, spurning guide,?Its milder features dwarfed beside?Her unbent will's majestic pride.?She sat among us, at the best,?A not unfeared, half-welcome guest,?Rebuking with her cultured phrase?Our homeliness of words and ways.?A certain pard-like, treacherous grace?Swayed the lithe limbs and dropped the lash,?Lent the white teeth their dazzling flash;?And under low brows, black with night,?Rayed out at times a dangerous light;?The sharp heat-lightnings of her face?Presaging ill to him whom Fate?Condemned to share her love or hate.?A woman tropical, intense?In thought and act, in soul and sense,?She blended in a like degree?The vixen and the devotee,?Revealing with each freak or feint?The temper of Petruchio's Kate,?The raptures of Siena's saint.?Her tapering hand and rounded wrist?Had facile power to form a fist;?The warm, dark languish of her eyes?Was never safe from wrath's surprise.?Brows saintly calm and lips devout?Knew every change of scowl and pout;?And the sweet voice had notes more high?And shrill for social battle-cry.
Since then what old cathedral town?Has missed her pilgrim staff and gown,?What convent-gate has held its lock?Against the challenge of her knock!?Through Smyrna's plague-hushed thoroughfares,?Up sea-set Malta's rocky stairs,?Gray olive slopes of hills that hem?Thy tombs and shrines, Jerusalem,?Or startling on her desert throne?The crazy Queen of Lebanon s?With claims fantastic as her own,?Her tireless feet have held their way;?And still, unrestful, bowed, and gray,?She watches under Eastern skies,?With hope each day renewed and fresh,?The Lord's quick coming in the flesh,?Whereof she dreams and prophesies!
Where'er her troubled path may be,?The Lord's sweet pity with her go!?The outward wayward life we see,?The hidden springs we may not know.?Nor is it given us to discern?What threads the fatal sisters spun,?Through what ancestral years has run?The sorrow with the woman born,?What forged her cruel chain of moods,?What set her feet in solitudes,?And held the love within her mute,?What mingled madness in the blood,?A life-long discord and annoy,?Water of tears with oil of joy,?And hid within the folded bud?Perversities of flower and fruit.?It is not ours to separate?The tangled skein of will and fate,?To show what metes and bounds should stand?Upon the soul's debatable land,?And between choice and Providence?Divide the circle of events;?But lie who knows our frame is just,?Merciful and compassionate,?And full of sweet assurances?And hope for all the language is,?That He remembereth we