Snow-Bound | Page 5

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 drooped 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,
[Illustration]?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?With claims fantastic as her own,?Her tireless feet have held their way;?And still, unrestful, bowed, and gray,?She watches under Eastern skies,
[Illustration]?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 He 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 are dust!
At last the great logs, crumbling low,?Sent out a dull and duller glow,
[Illustration]?The bull's-eye watch that hung in view,?Ticking its weary circuit through,?Pointed with mutely-warning sign?Its black hand to the hour of nine.?That sign the pleasant circle broke:?My uncle ceased his pipe to smoke,?Knocked from its bowl the refuse gray,?And laid it tenderly away,?Then roused himself to safely cover?The dull red brands with ashes over.?And while, with care, our mother laid?The work aside, her steps she stayed?One moment, seeking to express?Her grateful sense of happiness?For food and shelter, warmth and health,?And love's contentment more than wealth,?With simple wishes (not the weak,?Vain prayers which no fulfilment seek,?But such as warm the generous heart,?O'er-prompt to do with Heaven its part)?That none might lack, that bitter night,?For bread and clothing, warmth and light.
Within our beds awhile we heard?The wind that round the gables roared,?With now and then a ruder shock,?Which made our very bedsteads rock.?We heard the loosened clapboards tost,?The board-nails snapping in the frost;?And on us, through the unplastered wall,?Felt the light sifted snow-flakes fall.?But sleep stole on, as sleep will do?When hearts are light and life is new;?Faint and more faint the murmurs grew,?Till in the summer-land of dreams?They softened to the sound of streams,?Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars,?And lapsing waves on quiet shores.
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Next morn we wakened with the shout?Of merry voices high and clear;?And saw the teamsters drawing near?To break the drifted highways out.?Down the long hillside treading slow?We saw the half-buried oxen go,?Shaking the snow from heads uptost,?Their straining nostrils white with frost.?Before our door the straggling train?Drew up, an added team to gain.?The elders threshed their hands a-cold,?Passed, with the cider-mug, their jokes?From lip to lip; the younger folks?Down the loose snow-banks, wrestling, rolled,?Then toiled again the cavalcade?O'er windy hill, through clogged ravine,?And woodland paths that wound between?Low drooping pine-boughs winter-weighed.
[Illustration]?From every barn a team afoot,?At every house a new recruit,?Where, drawn by Nature's subtlest law,?Haply the watchful young men saw
[Illustration]?Sweet doorway pictures of the curls?And curious eyes of merry girls,?Lifting their hands in mock defence?Against the snow-ball's compliments,?And reading in each missive tost?The charm with Eden never lost.
We heard once more the sleigh-bells' sound;?And, following where the teamsters led,?The wise old Doctor went his round,
[Illustration]?Just pausing at our door to say,?In the brief autocratic way?Of one who, prompt at Duty's call,?Was free to urge her claim on all,?That some poor neighbor sick abed?At night our mother's aid would need.?For, one in generous thought and deed,?What mattered in the sufferer's sight?The Quaker matron's inward light,?The Doctor's mail of Calvin's creed??All hearts confess the saints elect?Who, twain in