Nay, hear me! The truth cannot harm you. When to-day
in her presence you stood
Was the hand that you gave her as white and clean as that
of her womanhood?
Go measure yourself by her standard; look back on the years
that have fled:
Then ask, if you need, why she tells you that the love of her
girlhood is dead.
She cannot look down to her lover: her love, like her soul, aspires;
He must stand by her side, or above her, who would kindle its
holy fires.
Now farewell! For the sake of old friendship I have ventured
to tell you the truth,
As plainly, perhaps, and as bluntly as I might in our earlier youth.
Julia C. R. Dorr [1825-1913]
A TRAGEDY
Among his books he sits all day
To think and read and write;
He does not smell the new-mown hay,
The roses red and white.
I walk among them all alone,
His silly, stupid wife;
The world seems tasteless, dead and done—
An empty thing is life.
At night his window casts a square
Of light upon the lawn;
I sometimes walk and watch it there
Until the chill of dawn.