Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes;
And in the hereafter angels may
Roll the stone from its grave away!
John Greenleaf Whittier.
Mr. Whittier’s statement of the origin of his poem of “Maud Müller” is thus given. He was driving with his sister through York, U.S.A., and stopped at a harvest field to inquire the way. A young girl raking hay near the stone-wall stopped to answer their inquiries. Whittier noticed as she talked that she bashfully raked the hay around and over her bare feet, and she was fresh and fair. The little incident left its impression, and he wrote out the poem that very evening. “But if I had had any idea,” he said, “that the plaguey little thing would have been so liked, I should have taken more pains with it.” To the inquiry as to the title, Maud Müller, he said it was suggested to him, and was not a selection. It came as the poem came. But he gives it the short German pronunciation, as Meuler, not the broad Yankee, Muller.
Mrs. Judge Jenkins.
[Being the only genuine sequel to “Maud Müller.”]
Maud Müller, all that summer day,