Dear violets, bloom and live!
To this beloved tomb
Your beauty and your bloom
Are the most precious tribute we can give.
And, oh, if your sweet soul of odor goes,
Blended with the clear trills of singing-birds,
Farther than my poor speech
Or wailing cry can reach
Into that realm of shadowy repose
Toward which I blindly yearn,
Praying in silence, "Oh, my love, return!"
Yet dare not try to touch with groping words,
So far it seems, and sweet,—
That realm wherein I may not hope to be
Until my wayworn feet
Put off the shoes of this mortality,—
Oh, let your incense-breath,
Laden with all this weight of love and woe
For him who went away so long ago,
Bridge for me Time and Death!
Blow, violets, blow!
And tell him in your blooming, o'er and o'er,
How in the places which he used to know
His name is still breathed fondly as of yore;
Tell him how often, in the dear old ways
Where bloomed our yesterdays,
The radiant days which I shall find no more,
My lingering footsteps shake
The dew-drops from your leaves, for his dear sake.
Wake, blue eyes, wake!
The earliest breath of June
Blows the white tassels from the cherry-boughs,
And in the deepest shadow of the noon
The mild-eyed oxen browse.
How tranquilly he sleeps,
He, whom so bitterly we mourn as dead!—
Although the new month sweeps
The over-blossomed spring-flower from his bed,
Giving fresh buds therefor,—
Although beside him still Love waits and weeps,
And yonder goes the war.
Wake, violets, wake!
Open your blue eyes wide!
Watch faithfully his lonely pillow here;
Let no rude foot-fall break
Your slender stems, nor crush your leaves aside;
See that no harm comes near
The dust to me so dear;—
O violets, hear!
The clouds hang low and heavy with warm rain,—
And when I come again,
Lo, with your blossoms his loved grave shall be
Blue as the marvellous sea
Laving the borders of his Italy!
PAUL BLECKER.
PART II.
You do not like this Lizzy Gurney? I know. There are a dozen healthy girls in that country-town whose histories would have been pleasanter to write and to read. I chose hers purposely. I chose a bilious, morbid woman to talk to you of, because American women are bilious and morbid. Men all cling desperately to the old book-type of women, delicate, sunny, helpless. I confess to even a man's hungry partiality for them,—these roses of humanity, their genus and species emphasized by but the faintest differing pungency of temper and common sense,—mere crumpling of the rose-leaves. But how many of them do you meet on the street?
McKinstry (with most men) kept this ideal in his brain, and bestowed it on every woman in a street-car possessed of soft eyes, gaiter-boots, and a blush. Dr. Blecker (with all women) saw through that mask, and knew them as they are. He knew there was no more prurient sign of the age of groping and essay in which we live than the unrest and diseased brains of its women.
Lizzy Gurney was but like nine-tenths of the unmarried young girls of the Northern States; there was some inactive, dumb power within,—she called it genius; there was a consciousness that with a man's body she would have been more of a man than her brother; there was, stronger than all, the unconquerable craving of Nature for a husband's and child's love,—she, powerless. So it found vent in this girl, as in the others, in perpetual self-analyzing, in an hysteric clinging to one creed after another,—in embracing the chimera of the Woman's-Rights prophets with her brain, and thrusting it aside with her heart: after a while, to lapse all into a marriage, made in heaven or hell, as the case might be.