Unquestioning, his childish guide
He followed, as the small hand led
To where a woman, gentle-eyed,
Her distaff fed.
She rose, she clasped her truant boy,
She thanked the stranger with her eyes;
The hermit gazed in doubt and joy
And dumb surprise.
And to!—with sudden warmth and light
A tender memory thrilled his frame;
New-born, the world-lost anchorite
A man became.
"O sister of El Zara's race,
Behold me!—had we not one mother?"
She gazed into the stranger's face
"Thou art my brother!"
"And when to share our evening meal,
She calls the stranger at the door,
She says God fills the hands that deal
Food to the poor."
"O kin of blood! Thy life of use
And patient trust is more than mine;
And wiser than the gray recluse
This child of thine.
"For, taught of him whom God hath sent,
That toil is praise, and love is prayer,
I come, life's cares and pains content
With thee to share."
Even as his foot the threshold crossed,
The hermit's better life began;
Its holiest saint the Thebaid lost,
And found a man!
1854.
MAUD MULLER.
The recollection of some descendants of a Hessian deserter in the Revolutionary war bearing the name of Muller doubtless suggested the somewhat infelicitous title of a New England idyl. The poem had no real foundation in fact, though a hint of it may have been found in recalling an incident, trivial in itself, of a journey on the picturesque Maine seaboard with my sister some years before it was written. We had stopped to rest our tired horse under the shade of an apple-tree, and refresh him with water from a little brook which rippled through the stone wall across the road. A very beautiful young girl in scantest summer attire was at work in the hay-field, and as we talked with her we noticed that she strove to hide her bare feet by raking hay over them, blushing as she did so, through the tan of her cheek and neck.