"'Genius, like Egypt's Monarch, timely wise,
Erects its own memorial ere it dies.'
"Oh, Edwin, look! Here is the ode that mother sings to little Mildred, here on the back of the monument. Mildred is my baby, you know," she said, in explanation to us, "and mother sings the most charming things to her."
"Please read it to us, Molly; I didn't bring my glasses."
That is what Professor Green said, but when we had known him longer we found out he was not so very dependent on glasses that he could not read an inscription carved in one-inch letters, but that he always made his wife read aloud when he could. When she read poetry, it was music, indeed. It seems he first realized what he felt for her when she read the "Blessed Damosel" in his class at college. He had been her instructor, as he had Miss Ball's.
"This ode of Timrod's was sung for the first time on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead at Magnolia Cemetery, here in Charleston, in sixty-seven, so I am told."
No wonder Professor Edwin wanted his Molly to read the poem! Her voice was the most wonderfully sympathetic and singularly fitted to the reading of poetry that I have ever heard. I longed for my father to hear her read. He could make me weep over poetry when I would go dry-eyed through all kinds of trouble, and now Mrs. Green had the same power:
"'Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
"'In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!
"'Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years
Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
And these memorial blooms.
"'Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths today,
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.
"'Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!'"
We were all very quiet for a moment and then St. Michael's bells rang out six-thirty o'clock, and in spite of poetical emotions we knew the pangs of hunger were due and it was time for dinner.
We were to sit together at a larger table that evening at dinner, to the satisfaction of all of us.