Eyes alive with a fire which yet the old man’s visage wore
At times, like the flash of a thunder-cloud when the storm is almost o’er.
3.
Toward the mettled stripling, then, the heart of the old man yearned;
And thus—while Hermann Van Ghelt once more, with a restless hunger, turned
From the grave of her who died so young, to his books and lawyer’s gown,
And the ceaseless clangor of mind with mind in the close and wrangling town—
They two, the boy and the grandsire, lived at the manor-house, and grew,
The one to all manly arts apace, the other a youth anew—
Pleased with the boy’s free spirit, and teaching him, step by step, to wield