The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman

Nature a devious by-way finds: solve me her secret whim,
That the seed of a gnarled oak should sprout to a sapling straight and prim;
That a russet should grow on the pippin stock, on the garden-rose a brier;
That a stalwart race, in old Hendrick's son, should smother its wonted fire.

Hermann, fond of his book, and shirking the brawny outdoor sports;
Sent to college, and choosing for life the law with her mouldy courts;
Proud, and of tender honor, as well became his father's blood,
But with cold and courtly self-restraint weighing the ill and good;

Wed to a lady whose delicate veins that molten azure held,
Ichor of equal birth, wherewith our gentry their couplings weld;
Viewing his father's careless modes with half a tolerant eye,
As one who honors, regretting not, old fashions passing by.

After a while the moment came when, unto the son and heir,
A son and heir was given in turn,—a moment of joy and prayer;
For the angel who guards the portals twain oped, in the self-same breath,
To the child the pearly gate of life, to the mother the gate of death.

Father, and son, and an infant plucking the daisies over a grave:
The swell of a boundless surge keeps on, wave following after wave;
Ever the tide of life sets toward the low invisible shore:
Whence had the current its distant source? when shall it flow no more?

2

Nature's serene renewals, that make the scion by one remove
Bear the ancestral blossom and thrive as the forest wilding throve!
Roseate stream of life, which hides the course its ducts pursue,
To rise, like that Sicilian fount, in far-off springs anew!

For the grandsire's vigor, rude and rare, asleep in the son had lain,
To waken in Hugh, the grandson's frame, with the ancient force again;

And ere the boy, said the Monmouth wives, had grown to his seventh year,
Well could you tell whose mantling blood swelled in his temples clear.

Tall, and bent in the meeting brows; swarthy of hair and face;
Shoulders parting square, but set with the future huntsman's grace;
Eyes alive with a fire which yet the old man's visage wore
At times, like the flash of a thunder-cloud when the storm is almost o'er.

3

Toward the mettled stripling, then, the heart of the old man yearned;
And thus—while Hermann Van Ghelt once more, with a restless hunger, turned
From the grave of her who died so young, to his books and lawyer's gown,
And the ceaseless clangor of mind with mind in the close and wrangling town—

They two, the boy and the grandsire, lived at the manor-house, and grew,
The one to all manly arts apace, the other a youth anew—
Pleased with the boy's free spirit, and teaching him, step by step, to wield
The mastery over living things, and the craft of flood and field.

Apt, indeed, was the scholar; and born with a subtle art to gain
The love of all dumb creatures at will; now lifting himself, by the mane,
Over the neck of the three-year colt, for a random bareback ride,
Now chasing the waves on the rifted beach at the turn of the evening tide.

Proud, in sooth, was the master: the youngster, he oft and roundly swore,
Was fit for the life of a gentleman led in the lusty days of yore!
And he took the boy wherever he drove,—to a county fair or race;
Gave him the reins and watched him guide the span at a spanking pace;

Taught him the sportsman's keen delight: to swallow the air of morn,
And start the whistling quail that hides and feeds in the dewy corn;
Or in clear November underwoods to bag the squirrels, and flush
The brown-winged, mottled partridge a-whir from her nest in the tangled brush;

Taught him the golden harvest laws, and the signs of sun and shower,
And the thousand beautiful secret ways of graft and fruit and flower;
Set him straight in his saddle, and cheered him galloping over the sand;
Sailed with him to the fishing-shoals and placed the helm in his hand.

Often the yacht, with all sail spread, was steered by the fearless twain
Around the beacon of Sandy Hook, and out in the open main;
Till the great sea-surges rolling in, as south-by-east they wore,
Lifted the bows of the dancing craft, and the buoyant hearts she bore.

But in dreamy hours, which young men know, Hugh loved with the tide to float
Far up the deep, dark-channeled creeks, alone in his two-oared boat;

While a fiery woven tapestry o'erhung the waters low,
The warp of the frosted chestnut, the woof with maple and birch aglow;

Picking the grapes which dangled down; or watching the autumn skies,
The osprey's slow imperial swoop, the scrawny heron's rise;
Nursing a longing for larger life than circled a rural home,
An instinct of leadership within, and of action yet to come.

4

Curtain of shifting seasons dropt on moor and meadow and hall,
Open your random vistas of changes that come with time to all!
Hugh grown up to manhood; foremost, searching the county through,
Of the Monmouth youth, in birth and grace, and the strength to will and do.

The father, past the prime of life, and his temples flecked with toil,
A bookman still, and leaving to Hugh the care of stock and soil.
Hendrick Van Ghelt, a bowed old man in a fireside-corner chair,
Counting the porcelain Scripture tiles which frame the chimney there,—

The shade of the stalwart gentleman the people used to know,
Forgetful of half the present scenes, but mindful of long-ago;
Aroused, mayhap, by growing murmurs of Southern feud, that came
And woke anew in his fading eyes a spark of their ancient flame.

5

Gazing on such a group as this, folds of the curtain drop,
Hiding the grandsire's form; and the wheels of the sliding picture stop.
Gone, that stout old Hendrick, at last! and from miles around they came,—
Farmer, and squire, and whispering youths, recalling his manhood's fame.

Dead: and the Van Ghelt manor closed, and the homestead acres leased;
For their owner had moved more near the town, where his daily tasks increased,
Choosing a home on the blue Passaic, whence the Newark spires and lights
Were seen, and over the salt sea-marsh the shadows of Bergen Heights.

Back and forth from his city work, the lawyer, day by day,
With the press of eager and toiling men, followed his wonted way;
And Hugh,—he dallied with life at home, tending the garden and grounds;
But the mansion longed for a woman's voice to soften its lonely sounds.

“Hugh,” said Hermann Van Ghelt, at length, “choose for yourself a wife,
Comely, and good, and of birth to match the mother who gave you life.
No words of woman have charmed my ear since last I heard her voice;
And of fairest and proudest maids her son should make a worthy choice.”

But now the young man's wandering heart from the great world turned away,
To long for the healthful Monmouth meads, the shores of the breezy bay;
And often the scenes and mates he knew in boyhood he sought again,
And roamed through the well-known woods, and lay in the grass where he once had lain.

University of Virginia Library

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