“What hast thou for thy scattered seed,
O Sower of the plain?
Where are the many gathered sheaves
Thy hope should bring again?”
“The only record of my work
Lies in the buried grain.”
“0 Conqueror of a thousand fields!
In dinted armor dight,
What growths of purple amaranth
Shall crown thy brow of might?”
“Only the blossom of my life
Flung widely in the fight.”
“What is the harvest of thy saints,
O God! who dost abide?
Where grow the garlands of thy chiefs
In blood and sorrow dyed?
What have thy servants for their pains?”
“This only,—to have tried.”
On the 26th of July, 1908, she wrote: “The thought came to me that if God only looked upon me, I should become radiant like a star.” This thought is embodied in the following quatrain.
Wouldst thou on me but turn thy wondrous sight,
My breast would be so flooded by thy light,
The light whose language is immortal song,
That I to all the ages should belong.
Two lines of hers have always seemed to me to express above all others her life’s philosophy:
In the house of labor best
Can I build the house of rest!
Of all her labors, heavy and varied as those of Hercules, her poetry was what she loved best. But she lived in an age when there are few who can take their spiritual meat in verse. The age of steel is an age of prose, and so she labored in season and out to give her message in prose as well as in poetry, with the spoken word as well as the written. She was the most willing of troubadours; she hastened gladly wherever she was called, whether it was to some stately banquet of the muses like the Bryant Centenary, or to a humble company of illiterate negroes, in the poor little chapel at Santo Domingo, where she preached all one season. Whether some rich and powerful association like the Woman’s Club at Chicago summoned her or some modest group of working women on Cape Cod, she was always ready. She asked no fee, but accepted what was given her. She spoke and wrote oftenest for love, and next often for an honorarium of five dollars. The first need of her being was to give. So much had been given to her that she was forever trying to pay the debt by giving of her store to others. I find in her own handwriting the best expression of this need of giving, that was perhaps the prime necessity of her life.
“I, for one, feel that my indebtedness grows with my years. And it occurred to me the other day that when I should depart from this earthly scene, “God’s poor Debtor” might be the fittest inscription for my gravestone, if I should have one. So much have I received from the great Giver, so little have I been able to return.”
One day a rash scatter-brained fellow who was always getting himself and others into hot water asked her this question: