University of Virginia Library

I. PART I.

There was an awful silence in the house
Where my dead father lay. When years had passed,
That silence lay upon my mother's face,
And mingled with her motions and her speech.
We lived alone,—alone save one stern guest
Who sat beside our hearth and made it cold:
By many a hearth he sits. Yet never came
A murmur or complaint from her thin lips.
When but a trembling wind-flower of a child,
They set me in a large and crowded school.
The pale preceptor clad in rusty black,
The reading classes, and the murmuring forms
Were torture; and the ringing play-ground, hell.
I shrank from crowds of loud and boisterous boys.
The pain and forfeit of each game was mine;
Contempt, and scorn, and taunts were rained on me;
I wept within my little bed at night,
And wished that I were happy in my grave.
From out this depth of sorrow, slowly grew
A kindred and strange sympathy with eve,
With the unhoused and outcast winds, and with
The rain which I had heard so often weep
Alone, within the middle of the night,
Like a poor, beaten, and despisèd child
That has been thrust forth from its father's door.
And often when the burning sun went down,
I sat and wept unseen. The dark'ning earth,
The void deserted sky, were like myself;
They seemed unhappy, sad, forsaken things;
My childish sorrows made me kin with them;
Orphans we sat together. Sitting there,
What joy, when o'er the huddled chimney-tops
Rose the great yellow moon! Since then I've seen
Her rise o'er mountain brows, droop large with bliss
O'er steaming autumn meads, touch lochs that spread
A hundred branching arms among the hills,
With leagues of throbbing silver—never more
With the delight of these remembered nights.
Tears dried upon my proud and burning cheeks;
When a tormentor struck me, to the soul
I stung him with a taunt. My new-found power
Made the world brighter; and to feel him wince
Was solitary joy—a fresh green turf
On which the caged lark sang. On autumn nights
My school-mates loved to gather at a forge,
And tell their stories round the furnace mouth.
I read strange legends in its crimson heart;
As I rehearsed the secrets of the fire,
I felt them grow toward me, drank the looks
They cast round to the dark and frowning night
That stood back from the glare. And these were they
Who hustled me at school, who drove me mad,
Who pelted me with names! The cowards shook,
And I smiled proudly in my secret heart:
I saw them tremble, and I struck them home.
At length, amid the phantoms of my brain,
A kind white face was mixed. It came and went.
Sometimes it slowly stole across the gloom,
And paused to gaze on me, then died away;
And sometimes it would lean above my couch,
And look into my eyes. As once it came
And hung above me for a silent hour,
I raised my wasted hand and touched its cheek:
It did not frown on me;—next, bolder grown,
I wandered o'er its brow, its mouth, its hair,
And then methought it smiled. I shrunk in fear,
Then touched the cheek again; and, wondering, said,
“Surely this should be my own mother's face!”
And dimly felt as if enclosed in arms,
As if an eager mouth were pressed to mine.
Delirium slid from off me like the flood
From off the world, and slowly I awoke
To the full knowledge of my mother's love,—
“God hath returned thee from the gates of death,
My poor tormented child!” That hour of joy!
That welcome back to life! I was as one
Drawn sorely wounded from his bed of blood
'Mong the war-horse's hoofs; as one redeemed
From the sea's foamy mouth, or arms of fire.
And in the progress of the weary days
My mother sat beside my bed, and told
How the long battle swayed 'tween life and death;
And how she 'tended me, and how, one night,
The life was wavering 'tween my parted lips,
Loose as the film that flutters on the grate;
And how, at twelve, she thought that all was o'er.
I stood within the street one April day,
Wan as a healthless primrose, which a leaf
Had shaded, that it could not drink the sun.
I lay down on a night of stormy rain;
The snow had fallen, and the world was dumb.
Now, showers of melody from unseen larks
Fell the long day upon the golden fields,
And the bare woods were putting on their green.
In those dark days I was surprised with joy
The deepest I have found upon the earth.
One night, when my weak limbs were drawing strength
From meats and drinks, and long delicious sleep,
I raised a book to kill the tedious hours—
The glorious Dreamer's—he, whose walls enclosed
An emperor's state; upon whose lonely sleep
The secret heavens opened, peopled thick
With angels, as the beam with swirling motes.
I was like one who at his girdle wears
An idle key, and with it, purposeless,
In the mere impulse of a wayward mood,
Opes a familiar door, and stands amazed,
Blind with the prisoned splendour which escapes,
Filling his dusky home. From earth's rude noise
I wandered through the quiet land of thought,
Where all was peaceful as the happy fields
Wherein the shades are silent with deep bliss,
And not a sound doth jar the golden air.
For me no more existed space or time,
Nor in my narrow being did I live;
That miser Death, whose lean and covetous hand
Hoards up the pomps and glories of the world,
Gave up his treasures, and Experience
Was like a fenceless common over which
I ranged at will. And so I have the noise
Of armies round me, wear the monarch's crown,
Die in the martyr's fire. Whatever joy
Or sorrow man has tasted, that I share;
Nor can my life be measured by my years.
“Oh, nothing, nothing; but I know you will.
Now won't you say you'll come?”
“And my reward?”