THE OLD MAID’S PRAYER TO DIANA.
By Mrs. Tighe, an Irish author, who wrote more than fifty years ago, when single women had not attained to the honorable position which they now occupy.
Since thou and the stars, my dear goddess, decree
That, old maid as I am, an old maid I must be,
O, hear the petition I offer to thee!
For to bear it must be my endeavor:
From the grief of my friendships all drooping around,
Till not one whom I loved in my youth can be found;
From the legacy-hunters, that near us abound,
Diana, thy servant deliver!
From the scorn of the young, and the flaunts of the gay,
From all the trite ridicule rattled away
By the pert ones, who know nothing wiser to say,—
Or a spirit to laugh at them, give her!
From repining at fancied neglected desert;
Or, vain of a civil speech, bridling alert;
From finical niceness, or slatternly dirt;
Diana, thy servant deliver!
From over solicitous guarding of pelf;
From humor unchecked, that most obstinate elf;
From every unsocial attention to self,
Or ridiculous whim whatsoever;
From the vaporish freaks, or methodical airs,
Apt to sprout in a brain that’s exempted from cares;
From impertinent meddling in others’ affairs;
Diana, thy servant deliver!
From the erring attachments of desolate souls;
From the love of spadille, and of matadore voles;[F]
Or of lap-dogs, and parrots, and monkeys, and owls,
Be they ne’er so uncommon and clever;
But chief from the love, with all loveliness flown,
Which makes the dim eye condescend to look down
On some ape of a fop, or some owl of a clown;
Diana, thy servant deliver!
From spleen at beholding the young more caressed;
From pettish asperity, tartly expressed;
From scandal, detraction, and every such pest;
From all, thy true servant deliver!
Nor let satisfaction depart from her cot;
Let her sing, if at ease, and be patient if not;
Be pleased when regarded, content when forgot,
Till the Fates her slight thread shall dissever.
[F] Terms used in Ombre, a game at cards.
GRANDFATHER’S REVERIE.
By THEODORE PARKER.
Grandfather is old. His back is bent. In the street he sees crowds of men looking dreadfully young, and walking fearfully swift. He wonders where all the old folks are. Once, when a boy, he could not find people young enough for him, and sidled up to any young stranger he met on Sundays, wondering why God made the world so old. Now he goes to Commencement to see his grandson take his degree, and is astonished at the youth of the audience. “This is new,” he says; “it did not use to be so fifty years ago.” At meeting, the minister seems surprisingly young, and the audience young. He looks round, and is astonished that there are so few venerable heads. The audience seem not decorous. They come in late, and hurry off early, clapping the doors after them with irreverent bang. But grandfather is decorous, well mannered, early in his seat; if jostled, he jostles not again, elbowed, he returns it not; crowded, he thinks no evil. He is gentlemanly to the rude, obliging to the insolent and vulgar; for grandfather is a gentleman; not puffed up with mere money, but edified with well-grown manliness. Time has dignified his good manners.
It is night. The family are all abed. Grandfather sits by his old-fashioned fire. He draws his old-fashioned chair nearer to the hearth. On the stand which his mother gave him are the candlesticks, also of old time. The candles are three quarters burnt down; the fire on the hearth also is low. He has been thoughtful all day, talking half to himself, chanting a bit of verse, humming a snatch of an old tune. He kissed his pet granddaughter more tenderly than common, before she went to bed. He takes out of his bosom a little locket; nobody ever sees it. Therein are two little twists of hair. As Grandfather looks at them, the outer twist of hair becomes a whole head of ambrosial curls. He remembers stolen interviews, meetings by moonlight. He remembers how sweet the evening star looked, and how he laid his hand on another’s shoulder, and said, “You are my evening star.”
The church-clock strikes the midnight hour. He looks in his locket again. The other twist is the hair of his first-born son. At this same hour of midnight, once, many years ago, he knelt and prayed, when the long agony was over,—“My God, I thank thee that, though I am a father, I am still a husband, too! What am I, that unto me a life should be given and another spared!” Now he has children, and children’s children, the joy of his old age. But for many a year his wife has looked to him from beyond the evening star. She is still the evening star herself, yet more beautiful; a star that never sets; not mortal wife now, but angel.
The last stick on his andirons snaps asunder, and
falls outward. Two faintly smoking brands
stand there. Grandfather lays them
together, and they flame up; the
two smokes are united in one
flame. “Even so let it
be in heaven,” says
Grandfather.
Useless, do you say you are? You are of great use. You really are. How are you useful? By being a man that is old. Your old age is a public good. It is indeed. No child ever listens to your talk without having a good done it that no schooling could do. When you are walking, no one ever opens a gate for you to pass through, and no one ever honors you with any kind of help, without being himself the better for what he does; for fellow-feeling with you ripens his soul for him.—Mountford.
THE HOUSE IN THE MEADOW.
By LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.
It stands in a sunny meadow,
The house so mossy and brown,
With its cumbrous old stone chimneys,
And the gray roof sloping down.
The trees fold their green arms round it,—
The trees a century old;
And the winds go chanting through them,
And the sunbeams drop their gold.
The cowslips spring in the marshes,
The roses bloom on the hill,
And beside the brook in the pasture
The herds go feeding at will.
Within, in the wide old kitchen,
The old folk sit in the sun,
That creeps through the sheltering woodbine,
Till the day is almost done.
Their children have gone and left them;
They sit in the sun alone!
And the old wife’s ears are failing
As she harks to the well-known tone
That won her heart in her girlhood,
That has soothed her in many a care,
And praises her now for the brightness
Her old face used to wear.
She thinks again of her bridal,—
How, dressed in her robe of white,
She stood by her gay young lover
In the morning’s rosy light.
O, the morning is rosy as ever,
But the rose from her cheek is fled;
And the sunshine still is golden,
But it falls on a silvered head.
And the girlhood dreams, once vanished,
Come back in her winter time,
Till her feeble pulses tremble
With the thrill of spring-time’s prime.
And looking forth from the window,
She thinks how the trees have grown
Since, clad in her bridal whiteness,
She crossed the old door-stone.
Though dimmed her eyes’ bright azure,
And dimmed her hair’s young gold,
The love in her girlhood plighted
Has never grown dim or old.
They sat in peace in the sunshine
Till the day was almost done,
And then, at its close, an angel
Stole over the threshold stone.
He folded their hands together,—
He touched their eyelids with balm,
And their last breath floated outward,
Like the close of a solemn psalm!
Like a bridal pair they traversed
The unseen, mystical road
That leads to the Beautiful City,
Whose “builder and maker is God.”
Perhaps in that miracle country
They will give her lost youth back,
And the flowers of the vanished spring-time
Will bloom in the spirit’s track.
One draught from the living waters
Shall call back his manhood’s prime;
And eternal years shall measure
The love that outlasted time.
But the shapes that they left behind them,
The wrinkles and silver hair,—
Made holy to us by the kisses
The angel had printed there,—
We will hide away ’neath the willows,
When the day is low in the west,
Where the sunbeams cannot find them,
Nor the winds disturb their rest.
And we’ll suffer no telltale tombstone,
With its age and date, to rise
O’er the two who are old no longer,
In the Father’s house in the skies.
A STORY OF ST. MARK’S EVE.
By THOMAS HOOD.
St. Mark’s Day is a festival which has been observed on the 25th of April, in Catholic countries, from time immemorial. The superstition alluded to in the following story was formerly very generally believed, and vigils in the church-porch at midnight were common.
“I hope it’ll choke thee!” said Master Giles, the yeoman; and, as he said it, he banged his big red fist on the old oak table. “I do say I hope it’ll choke thee!”
The dame made no reply. She was choking with passion and a fowl’s liver, which was the cause of the dispute. Much has been said and sung concerning the advantage of congenial tastes amongst married people; but the quarrels of this Kentish couple arose from too great coincidence in their tastes. They were both fond of the little delicacy in question, but the dame had managed to secure the morsel to herself. This was sufficient to cause a storm of high words, which, properly understood, signifies very low language. Their meal times seldom passed over without some contention of this sort. As sure as the knives and forks clashed, so did they; being in fact equally greedy and disagreedy; and when they did pick a quarrel, they picked it to the bone.
It was reported that, on some occasions, they had not even contented themselves with hard speeches, but had come to scuffling; he taking to boxing and she to pinching, though in a far less amicable manner than is practised by the taker of snuff. On the present difference, however, they were satisfied with “wishing each other dead with all their hearts”; and there seemed little doubt of the sincerity of the aspiration, on looking at their malignant faces; for they made a horrible picture in this frame of mind.
Now it happened that this quarrel took place on the morning of St. Mark; a saint who was supposed on that festival to favor his votaries with a peep into the book of fate. For it was the popular belief in those days, that, if a person should keep watch at midnight beside the church, the apparitions of all those of the parish who were to be taken by death before the next anniversary would be seen entering the porch. The yeoman, like his neighbors, believed most devoutly in this superstition; and in the very moment that he breathed the unseemly aspiration aforesaid, it occurred to him that the eve was at hand, when, by observing the rite of St. Mark, he might know to a certainty whether this unchristian wish was to be one of those that bear fruit. Accordingly, a little before midnight, he stole quietly out of the house, and set forth on his way to the church.
In the mean time, the dame called to mind the same ceremonial; and, having the like motive for curiosity with her husband, she also put on her cloak and calash, and set out, though by a different path, on the same errand.
The night of the Saint was as dark and chill as the mysteries he was supposed to reveal; the moon throwing but a short occasional glance, as sluggish masses of cloud were driven slowly from her face. Thus it fell out that our two adventurers were quite unconscious of being in company, till a sudden glimpse of moonlight showed them to each other, only a few yards apart. Both, through a natural panic, became pale as ghosts; and both made eagerly toward the church porch. Much as they had wished for this vision, they could not help quaking and stopping on the spot, as if turned to stones; and in this position the dark again threw a sudden curtain over them, and they disappeared from each other.
The two came to one conclusion; each conceiving that St. Mark had marked the other to himself. With this comfortable knowledge, the widow and widower elect hied home again by the roads they came; and as their custom was to sit apart after a quarrel, they repaired to separate chambers, each ignorant of the other’s excursion.
By and by, being called to supper, instead of sulking as aforetime, they came down together, each being secretly in the best humor, though mutually suspected of the worst. Amongst other things on the table, there was a calf’s sweetbread, being one of those very dainties that had often set them together by the ears. The dame looked and longed, but she refrained from its appropriation, thinking within herself that she could give up sweetbreads for one year; and the farmer made a similar reflection. After pushing the dish to and fro several times, by a common impulse they divided the treat; and then, having supped, they retired amicably to rest, whereas until then they had seldom gone to bed without falling out. The truth was, each looked upon the other as being already in the churchyard.
On the morrow, which happened to be the dame’s birthday, the farmer was the first to wake; and knowing what he knew, and having, besides, but just roused himself out of a dream strictly confirmatory of the late vigil, he did not scruple to salute his wife, and wish her many happy returns of the day. The wife, who knew as much as he, very readily wished him the same; having, in truth, but just rubbed out of her eyes the pattern of a widow’s bonnet that had been submitted to her in her sleep. She took care, however, at dinner to give the fowl’s liver to the doomed man; considering that when he was dead and gone she could have them, if she pleased, seven days in the week; and the farmer, on his part, took care to help her to many tidbits. Their feeling toward each other was that of an impatient host with regard to an unwelcome guest, showing scarcely a bare civility while in expectation of his stay, but overloading him with hospitality when made certain of his departure.
In this manner they went on for some six months, without any addition of love between them, and as much selfishness as ever, yet living in a subservience to the comforts and inclinations of each other, sometimes not to be found even amongst couples of sincerer affections. There were as many causes for quarrel as ever, but every day it became less worth while to quarrel; so letting bygones be bygones, they were indifferent to the present, and thought only of the future, considering each other (to adopt a common phrase) “as good as dead.”
Ten months wore away, and the farmer’s birthday arrived in its turn. The dame, who had passed an uncomfortable night, having dreamed, in truth, that she did not much like herself in mourning, saluted him as soon as the day dawned, and, with a sigh, wished him many years to come. The farmer repaid her in kind, the sigh included; his own visions having been of the painful sort; for he dreamed of having a headache from wearing a black hat-band, and the malady still clung to him when awake. The whole morning was spent in silent meditation and melancholy, on both sides; and when dinner came, although the most favorite dishes were upon the table, they could not eat. The farmer, resting his elbows upon the board, with his face between his hands, gazed wistfully on his wife. The dame, leaning back in her high arm-chair, regarded the yeoman quite as ruefully. Their minds, travelling in the same direction, and at an equal rate, arrived together at the same reflection; but the farmer was the first to give it utterance:
“Thee’d be missed, dame, if thee were to die!”
The dame started. Although she had nothing but death at that moment before her eyes, she was far from dreaming of her own exit. Recovering, however, from the shock, her thoughts flowed into their old channel, and she rejoined in the same spirit:
“I wish, master, thee may live so long as I!”
The farmer, in his own mind, wished to live rather longer; for, at the utmost, he considered that his wife’s bill of mortality had but two months to run; the calculation made him sorrowful; during the last few months she had consulted his appetite, bent to his humor, and conformed her own inclinations to his, in a manner that could never be supplied.
His wife, from being at first useful to him, had become agreeable, and at last dear; and as he contemplated her approaching fate, he could not help thinking out audibly, “that he should be a lonesome man when she was gone.” The dame, this time, heard the survivorship foreboded without starting; but she marvelled much at what she thought the infatuation of a doomed man. So perfect was her faith in the infallibility of St. Mark, that she had even seen the symptoms of mortal disease, as palpable as plague-spots, on the devoted yeoman. Giving his body up, therefore, for lost, a strong sense of duty persuaded her that it was imperative on her, as a Christian, to warn the unsuspecting farmer of his dissolution. Accordingly, with a solemnity adapted to the subject, a tenderness of recent growth, and a memento mori face, she broached the matter in the following question:
“Master, how bee’st thee?”
“As hearty as a buck, dame; and I wish thee the like.”
A dead silence ensued; the farmer was as unprepared as ever. There is a great fancy for breaking the truth by dropping it gently; an experiment which has never answered, any more than with iron-stone china. The dame felt this; and, thinking it better to throw the news at her husband at once, she told him, in as many words, that he was a dead man.
It was now the yeoman’s turn to be staggered. By a parallel course of reasoning, he had just wrought himself up to a similar disclosure, and the dame’s death-warrant was just ready upon his tongue, when he met with his own despatch, signed, sealed, and delivered. Conscience instantly pointed out the oracle from which she had derived the omen.
“Thee hast watched, dame, at the church porch, then?”
“Ay, master.”
“And thee didst see me spirituously?”
“In the brown wrap, with the boot hose. Thee were coming to the church, by Fairthorn Gap; in the while I were coming by the Holly Hedge.”
For a minute the farmer paused; but the next he burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter; peal after peal, each higher than the last. The poor woman had but one explanation for this phenomenon. She thought it a delirium; a lightening before death; and was beginning to wring her hands, and lament, when she was checked by the merry yeoman:
“Dame, thee bee’st a fool. It was I myself thee seed at the church porch. I seed thee, too; with a notice to quit upon thy face; but, thanks to God, thee bee’st a living; and that is more than I cared to say of thee this day ten-month!”
The dame made no answer. Her heart was too full to speak; but, throwing her arms round her husband, she showed that she shared in his sentiment. And from that hour, by practising a careful abstinence from offence, or a temperate sufferance of its appearance, they became the most united couple in the county. But it must be said, that their comfort was not complete till they had seen each other, in safety, over the perilous anniversary of St. Mark’s Eve.
* * * * *
The moral this story conveys is one which might prove a useful monitor to us all, if we could keep it in daily remembrance. Few, indeed, are so coarse in their manifestations of ill-temper as this Kentish couple are described; but we all indulge, more or less, in unreasonable fretfulness, and petty acts of selfishness, in the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters,—in fact, in all the relations of life. It would help us greatly to be kind, forbearing, and self-sacrificing toward neighbors, friends, and relatives, if it were always present to our minds that death may speedily close our intercourse with them in this world.—L. M. C.
