She meets with smiles our bitter grief,
With songs our groans of pain ;
She mocks with tint of flower and leaf
The war-field's crimson stain.

Still, in the cannon's pause we hear
Her sweet thanksgiving psalm ;
Too near to God for doubt or fear,
She shares the eternal calm.

She knows the seed lies safe below
The fires that blast and burn;
For all the tears of blood we sow
She waits the rich return.

She sees with clearer eye than ours
The good of suffering born,—

The hearts that blossom like her flowers,
And ripen like her corn.

O, give to us, in times like these,

The vision of her eyes;

And make her fields and fruited trees

Our golden prophecies!

O, give to us her finer ear!

Above this stormy din,

We too would hear the bells of cheer

Ring peace and freedom in!

John George Whittier.

CCLXXVIII

COME UP FROM THE FIELDS, FATHER.

25

330

35

40

Come up from the fields, father; here's a letter from our Pete, And come to the front door, mother; here's a letter from thy

dear son.

Lo, 'tis autumn;

Lo where the fields, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio's villages, with leaves fluttering in

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang, and grapes on the trellised vines

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat, where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo! the sky, so calm, so transparent after the rain and with wondrous clouds;

Below too all calm, all vital and beautiful-and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well;

ΙΟ

But now from the fields come, father-come at the daughter's call;

And come to the entry, mother-to the front door come, right

away.

Fast as she can she hurries—something ominous—her steps trembling;

She does not tarry to smooth her white hair, nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly;

15

Oh this is not our son's writing, yet his name is signed. Oh a strange hand writes for our dear son—oh stricken mother's soul !

All swims before her eyes—flashes with black-she catches the main words only;

Sentences broken-gunshot wound in the breast-cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah! now the single figure to me

20

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio, with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans.

25

Grieve not so, dear mother (the just grown daughter speaks through her sobs;

The little sisters huddle around, speechless and dismayed). See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas, poor boy, he will never be better (nor, may be, needs to be better, that brave and simple soul).

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already, 30 The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better;

She, with thin form, presently drest in black;

By day her meals untouched-then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,

35

Oh, that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life, escape and withdraw

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

CCLXXIX

Walt Whitman.

SONNET.

Through the night, through the night,

In the saddest unrest,

Wrapt in white, all in white,

With her babe on her breast,

Walks the mother so pale,

Staring out on the gale

Through the night!

Through the night, through the night,

Where the sea lifts the wreck,

Land in sight, close in sight!
On the surf-flooded deck
Stands the father so brave,

Drawing on to his grave

Through the night!

Richard Henry Stoddard.

5

ΙΟ

CCLXXX

A DEDICATION TO CHARLES DICKENS OF THE LIFE OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

Genius and its rewards are briefly told
A liberal nature and a niggard doom.,
A difficult journey to a splendid tomb.
New writ, nor lightly weighed that story old
In gentle Goldsmith's life I here unfold:
Through other than lone wild or desert gloom,
In its mere joy and pain, its blight and bloom,
Adventurous. Come with me and behold,

O friend with heart as gentle for distress,
As resolute with wise true thoughts to bind
The happiest to the unhappiest of our kind,
That there is fiercer crowded misery
In garret toil and London loneliness
Than in cruel islands mid the far-off sea.

John Forster.

5

IO

CCLXXXI

SONNET.

Sad is our youth, for it is ever going,
Crumbling away beneath our very feet;
Sad is our life, for onward it is flowing
In current unperceived, because so fleet;

Sad are our hopes, for they were sweet in sowing-
But tares, self-sown, have over-topped the wheat;
Sad are our joys, for they were sweet in blowing—
And still, oh still, their dying breath is sweet;
And sweet is youth, although it hath bereft us
Of that which made our childhood sweeter still;
And sweet is middle life, for it hath left us
A newer good to cure an older ill;

5

IO

And sweet are all things when we learn to prize them
Not for their sake, but His who grants them or denies them.

Aubrey De Vere.

CCLXXXII

THE UGLY PRINCESS.

My parents bow, and lead them forth,
For all the crowd to see-

Ah well! the people might not care
To cheer a dwarf like me.

They little know how I could love,
How I could plan and toil,

To swell those drudges' scanty gains,
Their mites of rye and oil.

They little know what dreams have been
My playmates, night and day,

Of equal kindness, helpful care,

A mother's perfect sway.

Now earth to earth in convent walls,

To earth in churchyard sod:

I was not good enough for man,

חו

IO

15

And so am given to God.

Charles Kingsley.

CCLXXXIII

WEARINESS.

O little feet! that such long years
Must wander on through hopes and fears,
Must ache and bleed beneath your load;

I, nearer to the wayside inn

Where toil shall cease and rest begin,

Am weary, thinking of your road!