University of Virginia Library

I wonder if every student sits brooding far into the night,
And hides from the wife of his bosom the thing he is fain to write.
Can it be right to conceal the work he is labouring at?
I want to sit up beside him, but he will not listen to that;
Yet rest I cannot; I lie there, sleepless, and feigning to sleep,
When, in the hush of the darkness, soft to my side he will creep,
Fearing to rouse me lying, broad awake, all through the hours,
Watching the moonbeams flitting, or hearing the patter of showers,
The grey owl screech to the bat, or the moan of the throbbing sea,
Or puzzling over the house-books, which will not come right with me.—
We are not rich, and, maybe, I do not keep house as I might,
Though I want to be thrifty, and debt is a thing that I hate outright;
Still there is waste, no doubt, and he has a right to complain,
And maids are so careless, and break things that cannot be mended again;
And will have their young men coming: and how can I say them nay,
When I recall how I longed to see him at evening grey?
I scrimp and save, and, at times, I am almost weary of life;
It would have been better for him had he married a managing wife.
Yet all my cares were as nothing it only my husband were right,
If he were not so silent by day, if he were not so dreamy at night,
Cared for things in the house as he cared for them once on a time,
Sat by my side in the evenings, and made my life sweet and sublime,
Did he not joke at my questions—a wife is not meant for sport,
Always put off with a jest; and jesting is not his forte.
Yet oh he loves me, he loves; and I hate myself when I complain,
Only the hunger of love ever breeds dream-visions of pain.
What is he always writing? Sometimes I tremble to think,
What, if it be of Religion? what, if he be on the brink
Of falling away from the Faith, and the way which his fathers trod,
And, as the minister told us, out of the hand of God?
Rarely he goes to Church, though he tells me I ought to go,
When the kirk-bells on the Sabbath are chiming soft and low;
“You have your window,” he says, “for outlook on all the vast,
Dim, everlasting hills, and the shadows on earth they cast,—
The old church-window that shines with white-winged angel forms,
And martyred saints they are bearing from earth's most bitter storms;
And life would be dark to you, dear, lacking the light that it brings,
Even though the cobwebs dim the aureoles now, and the wings.
I have my outlook too, but not so pretty as yours
With dreams of the saintly souls, and the love that all endures;
Colder my light and harder, but clearer, at least, to me,
For cobwebbed angels somehow help not my vision to see.
But to the same Eternal, we look for the breaking day
Of an age that is surely coming, when shadows shall flee away.”
I am troubled at sayings like these, though I hardly know what they mean,
And I pray that he yet may see the truth which my heart has seen.
For oh he loves me, loves me, ever so tender and true!—
And yet if he loves not God, too, what shall my poor heart do?