University of Virginia Library

Some faces stand for twilight, or the shade
Of web-like dog-day mist, which does but wrap
Summer-flushed earth in a becoming veil;
These have a fascination of their own:
But when a face which is the sun itself
Wears an eclipse, sad for the world it lights!

Something was strange at Clement Summerfield's,
And that was Minta's countenance, now vexed
With knots, and puzzling twists of lip and brow;
Now gazing vague defiance into air;
And now at war with tears, but conquering.

Her guests seemed her chief pleasure, and they knew
It was no sorrow to her that their stay
Caused rarer visits from a farmer's son
Bred just across the mountain, who had found
Excuse of trade, or work exchanged, to come
Often to Clement's cottage, and stay long;
Minta's “Perhaps,”—the household cognomen
When he was out of hearing; and in months
Gone by, referred to as “The Probable.”
But Solon Dale, whatever he had been
To Minta, was not now what he would be,—
Accepted suitor,—yet was unconvinced
That hence their paths inevitably diverged,
And never could make one road,—that being his.

It was a first-love fallacy, perceived
As such by Minta, every day made clear
By her whole nature's undisguised revolt
From his accustomed mastery of will,
And narrow, obstinate plan, that tethered her
To the obsolete letter of a promise dead.

Moreover, mountain-high he piled the wall
Betwixt them, scoffing at her taste for books,
Which spoilt her for a housewife. Well enough
For those two white-faced friends of hers, he said,—
Spinsters elect; but what a farmer's wife
Wanted of more than just to read and write,
And cipher through the Long Division rules,
He could not see! To teach the district school
No more was needed. Learned she could not be,—
It was not in her.
“Which last may be true,
But I reserve right to be my own judge,”
Thought Minta; and grew sure that Solon's self
Would be the one most uninteresting book
To take for life-long conning. Yet sometimes
Memories of ancient fondness would awake
And counterfeit love's claim. And so things stood
When Esther went to Eleanor at the inn.
And Esther, wishing much, for Minta's peace,
That she would say the unavoidable “No”
For once and always in their absence, stayed
To give her solitude and unbiassed thought.

Letters from Ruth came often. Isabel
And she were quiet, 'mid continual stir
Of work-and-wages questions. There had been
Meetings, conventions; now and then a girl
Spoke on the rostrum for herself, and such
As felt aggrieved. Ruth did not like that course,
Nor “strikes,” that ever threatened. “Why should we,
Battling oppression, tyrants be ourselves,
Forcing mere brief concession to our wish?
Are not employers human as employed?
Are not our interests common? If they grind
And cheat as brethren should not, let us go
Back to the music of the spinning-wheel,
And clothe ourselves at hand-looms of our own,
As did our grandmothers. The very name
Of ‘strike’ has so unwomanly a sound,
If not inhuman, savoring of old feuds
And savage conflicts! If indeed there is
Injustice,—if the rule of selfishness
Must be, invariably, mill-owners' law,
As the dissatisfied say,—if evermore
The laborer's hire tends downward, then we all
Must elsewhere turn; for nobody should moil
Just to add wealth to men already rich.
Only a drudge will toil on, with no hope
Widening from well-paid labor.”
So Ruth thought
And wrote to Esther. And of Isabel,—
For Eleanor's anxious fears would not be hid,
And Ruth had been close questioned,—
“Isabel
Seemed never happier; no, nor handsomer!
She is so like the fragrant blush-rose buds
That looked in from the garden, when the days
Were long in June, and I was at my book
Or sewing in my favorite doorway-seat,
My father still alive, and all things glad!
I love her for her beauty, and she seems
To bring back the lost perfume of my youth.”

And Miriam Willoughby, let in to all
The interests of these two, persuaded them,
Now that her Ralph sent word of new delays
And complications not to be escaped,
To be her guests awhile, and they explored
Together the hill-country.
Lakes that held
Great mountain-mysteries in their bosoms, stilled
With wonder, or moved quietly at times
With ripples as with thoughts, drew their charmed feet
To white, sequestered beaches. And sometimes
A steady oarsman rowed them down the curves
Of Bearcamp Water to Lake Ossipee,
Whence they returned with spoil of autumn woods,
With trailing streamers, orange, crimson, gold,
Splashing the sombre shadows of the hills
Gloomed in clear crystal; and their little boat
Laden with pine-cones for an evening fire,
Now often welcome,—and with curious flints,
Stone-arrows, dropped by savage Pennacook
Returning on his war-path by the lake,
To the stronghold of Paugus, which they saw
Rise like a dome among the farther hills.

And Miriam told them, sitting side by side
On Ossipee's steep crags, the higher range
Stretching in panorama east and west
Beyond green Bearcamp Valley at their feet,—
No lovelier was Tempe to the Greek,—
Told them how once upon Pequawket's slope
She lingered, as the summer sun went down,
Her fellow-pilgrims vanishing from sight,
Bounding like chamois up into the mists
Of the veiled summit: all the world below,
Path, mountain-forest, changed to one gray blank;
And she alone there in a vapor-rift,
That left one lichened crag, one blasted tree
Above her head, and one vast mountain-gap
Brimmed with a cloudy sunset's awful red.
That lurid gorge seemed widening vast and far
As an eternity: it was like death,
The silence, and the weight of weariness
That bound her there, immovable;—when, hark!
An accent almost human overhead,—
Was it indeed a bird?—
“Here, heavenward!
O, here, traveller! heavenward!”—
It sounded as a voice might, dropped to earth
By an ascending seraph. And she said,
“Children, when people talk of nightingales
And skylarks of Old England, you may say
One songster haunts our mountain-solitudes
Whose voice is like a spirit's, never heard
Except as floating from invisible height:—
Though but a sparrow with a snowy throat,
To me it was as if the mountain's heart
Uttered heaven's invitation.
“Yet that night
Was ghostly, more than heavenly; for we stayed
Till dawn upon Pequawket's hidden top,
Hidden from eyes below, that only saw
Our camp-fire as a star above the cloud.
We to ourselves were shipwrecked mariners
In a great sea of pallid mist, that surged
And curled up to our feet. We stood on rocks
Floating in vapor. Dim isles loomed around
Out of the fog, an archipelago
Of desolation. We were cast adrift
'Mid unsubstantial guesses of a world
Such as old Chaos in his slumber shaped.
And some one said, ‘We are philosophers!
Life is illusion: we and fogs are real.’
And then another,—with him I agreed,—
‘Who climbs to isolation from mankind,
There thinking to find wisdom, is a fool.’”

And then, by magic of her vivid words,
She set their feet among the loftier hills
Peopling the cloudy north. They heard the roar
Of Ammonoosuc; Fabyan's breezy horn,
Wakening the mountain-echoes; saw the trail
Of Ethan Crawford's snow-shoes on the track
Of catamount or bear; and felt the slide
Of the awful avalanche that swept away
The Willey children out of summer sleep,
Through agony of storm and flood, to death,
Knelled by the midnight thunder.
Esther said:
“Better to stay away from those grim heights!
Are not these lower hills more beautiful,—
And grand enough, and terrible enough,
When storms shake their foundations?
“I have learned,
Watching him from the Sandwich upland-fields,
To reverence Whiteface, like a patriarch
Standing up, a head taller than his sons,
Covering them with his mantle. We were housed
At Summerfield Farm one rainy day, a blank
Where once the mountains stood. O, how we longed
To see their faces! All my losses came
Back to me then. Life seemed a sterile plain,
Here and hereafter. Eyes that have climbed steeps
Learn to hate levels. We both sung for joy
When back through a great sunburst came the hills!”

“How grand it was!” said Eleanor. “I have kept
A picture of that mountain-burial
And resurrection; though, Miss Willoughby,
The lines are not my own; I cannot rhyme:—