And then I saw a palace broad as earth,
Built beautiful of land and seas,—
Its eastern gate shone in the morning's birth,
The west o'ertopped the trees.
Free as wild waves upon an autumn day,
A world of brothers through its space
Might wander up and down, and sunbeams play
Even on Sorrow's face.
Here in the broad sunned silence of the noon
Peace waiteth to salute the worn,
And ever crowneth with her tender boon
Those who have nobly borne.
Like shafted light dropped in a sunset sea,
The radiant pillars of my home
Send from their glowing swift mortality
Great voices crying, "Come!"
THE DEACON'S HOLOCAUST.
I
A First-class old lady is the most precious social possession of a New-England town. I have been in places where this office of Select Woman had languished for want of a proper incumbent,—that is, where the feminine element was always supplicatory, never authoritative. In such a place you may find the Select Men as vulgar and unclean as are some of the more pretentious politicians of State or nation; the variety-store sands its sugar quite up to the city-standard; and the parson is as timid a timeserver as the Bishop of Babylon. No rich local tone and character are to be found in such a place.
This deplorable state of things had never existed in Foxden. When strangers took a carriage at the depot and asked to be shown whatever was noteworthy in the town, they were driven to a many-gabled house shaded by a majestic oak, and informed that there lived Mrs. Widesworth, the grand-daughter of Twynintuft, the famous elocutionist. They were also assured that the oak was no other than the Twynintuft Oak, celebrated in the well-known sonnet of a distinguished American poet. Moreover, they were instructed that the room just to the right of the porch was a study added by Twynintuft himself in the year '87, and that the shattered shed in the background was originally an elocutionary laboratory which had seen the forming of many Congressional orators.