"Hannah said at first she jest laid still with her eyes shut, and felt the wind blowin' over her face, and then she got to droppin' off to sleep every little while, and after she'd begun to feel rested, she'd lay there and look up at the sky and watch the clouds floatin' past, and she said she never knew before how pretty the sky was. She'd been livin' under it all her life and never had time to look up at it.
"Did you ever think, child," said Aunt Jane, breaking off in her story, "that nearly all the work we've got to do keeps us lookin' down? And once in awhile it's a good thing to stop work and look up at the sky. Parson Page used to say that every sunrise and moonrise and sunset was a message from heaven sayin' 'Look up! Look up! for earth is not your home.' Hannah said lookin' up at the sky was like lookin' into deep water, and sometimes she'd feel as if her soul had left her body and she didn't know whether she was still on this earth or whether she'd died and gone to heaven; and she believed if folks would lay off from work once a year and rest under the trees the way she did, they'd live to be as old as Methuselah."
Had I not heard it once before, this homely tale of woman's work and woman's weariness, that life repeats with endless variations? Told in simple rhyme it lay between the yellowed pages of an old scrap-book and hovered half-forgotten in a dusty corner of my brain.
"Aunt Jane," I said, "there was once a woman who felt just as Hannah Crawford did, and she put her feelings into words and called them 'A Woman's Longing:'
"'All hopes, all wishes, all desires have left me,
My heart is empty as a last year's nest,
O, great Earth—Mother! take me to thy bosom
[193] And give a tired child rest.
"'Nay, not a grave! Leave thy green turf unbroken!
Not death I ask,—but strength to bear my life,
This endless round of strange, conflicting duties,
These stale conventions and this aimless strife.
"'I have no part nor lot in such existence,
And I am like a stream cut from its source;
Let me go hence and quench the spirit's thirsting
At those deep springs of force
"'That well unseen neath all life's myriad phases,
Rousing to action, lulling to repose—
A child's first cry, a warrior's call to battle,
A planet's march, the fading of a rose.
"'Give me a bed among earth's flowers and grasses,
Some shadowy place from men and things apart,
Where I can hear and feel the steady beating
Of Nature's tireless heart,
"'Stilling the tumult of my brain, o'er-crowded
With fears and fancies that have banished sleep,
And losing pain and weariness forever
In heaven's unfathomed deep,