We meet upon the Level and we part upon the Square:
What words of precious meaning those words Masonic are!
Come let us contemplate them, they are worthy of our thought—
With the highest and the lowest, and the rarest they are fraught.
We meet upon the Level, though from every station come—
The King from out his palace and the poor man from his home;
For the one must leave his diadem without the Mason's door,
And the other finds his true respect upon the checkered floor.
We part upon the Square for the world must have its due;
We mingle with its multitude, a cold, unfriendly crew;
But the influence of our gatherings in memory is green,
And we long, upon the Level, to renew the happy scene.
There's a world where all are equal—we are hurrying towards it fast—
We shall meet upon the Level there when the gates of death are passed;
We shall stand before the Orient, and our Master will be there
To try the blocks we offer His unerring square.
We shall meet upon the Level there, but never thence depart:
There's a mansion—'tis all ready for each zealous, faithful heart:—
There's a Mansion and a welcome, and a multitude is there,
Who have met upon the Level and been tried upon the Square.
Let us meet upon the Level, then, while laboring patient here—
Let us meet and let us labor tho' the labor seem severe;
Already in the western sky the signs bid us prepare,
To gather up our working tools and part upon the square.
Hands around, ye faithful Ghiblimites, the bright, fraternal chain,
We part upon the Square below to meet in heaven again;—
Oh, what words of precious meaning those words Masonic are—
We meet upon the Level and we part upon the Square.
[AMELIA B. WELBY]
Mrs. Amelia B. Welby, Kentucky's most famous female poet of the mid-century, was born at St. Michael's, Maryland, February 3, 1819. When she was fifteen years old her family removed to Louisville, Kentucky, the city of her fame. In 1837, George D. Prentice, with his wonderful nose for finding female verse-makers, added Amelia to his already long and ever-increasing list. He printed her first poem in his Journal, and crowned her as the finest branch of his poetical tree. His declaration that she possessed the divine afflatus meant nothing, as he had said the same thing about many another sentimental single lady, pining upon the peaks of poesy. But Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus W. Griswold soon separated her from the versifiers and placed her among the poets, and thus her fame has come down to us with fragrance. In June, 1838, Amelia was married to George Welby, a Louisville merchant, who also held her to be a poet born in the purple. Mrs. Welby's verse became well-known and greatly admired in many parts of the country, and, in response to numerous requests for a volume of her work, she collected her Journal verse and published it under the title of Poems by Amelia (Boston, 1845). A second edition was published the following year, and by 1860 the volume was said to be in its seventeenth edition! Robert W. Weir's illustrated edition of her poems was issued in 1850, and this is the most desirable form in which her work has been preserved. These various editions will at once convey some idea of her great popularity. With Poe, Prentice, and Griswold singing her praises, and the public purchasing her poems as rapidly as they could be made into books, Amelia's fame seemed secure. To-day, however, no one has read any of her verse save The Rainbow, which has been set down as her best poem, and she has become essentially an historical personage, the keepsake of Kentucky letters. While the greater number of her poems are quite unreadable, her elegy for Miss Laura M. Thurston, a sister versifier, is well done and her finest piece of work. Mrs. Welby died at Louisville, May 3, 1852, when but thirty-three years of age. Had she lived longer, and the poetic appreciation of the American people suffered no change, the heights to which she would have attained can be but vaguely guessed at.