The reader of these lines, perhaps, at the moment, a judge of the supreme court, a member of parliament, or a minister of the Gospel, will instantly look back to his boyhood’s days and see the meek-eyed oxen standing before the log-cabin door, from which issues the form of his father, bearing a long slender switch, which he twirls round in front of the gentle animals as he says “haw, Buck, gee, Bright”; and again he will see them struggling in the yoke, their wide-spreading horns clashing together as they draw the great logs into a heap for the burning; and seeing the result of the early settlers’ efforts in the magnificent stretches of cleared land, and waving fields of grain, he will sing, with our poet, in patriotic strain:
Hurrah! for the grand old forest land,
Where freedom spreads her pinion;
Hurrah with me, for the maple tree,
Hurrah! for the new Dominion.
It is, though portrayed in the humblest language, a very pathetic picture he draws of “Old Hannah,” poor old woman, husband and children all gone, sitting, on the Sabbath morn, on the doorstep of her desolate home, with her Bible on her knee, looking as sweetly patient as only those purified by affliction can look, and silently teaching us to thank God for the suffering that alone can fit us for the kingdom of heaven. We quote these lines:
In her faded widow’s cap;
She is sitting alone
On the old grey stone
With her Bible in her lap.