MY BROTHER AND I.
From the door where I stand I can see his fair land
Sloping up to a broad sunny height,
The meadows new-shorn, and the green wavy corn,
The buckwheat all blossoming white:
There a gay garden blooms, there are cedars like plumes,
And a rill from the mountain leaps up in a fountain,
And shakes its glad locks in the light.
He dwells in the hall where the long shadows fall
On the checkered and cool esplanade;
I live in a cottage secluded and small,
By a gnarly old apple-tree's shade:
Side by side in the glen, I and my brother Ben,—
Just the river between us, with borders as green as
The banks where in childhood we played.
But now nevermore upon river or shore
He runs or he rows by my side;
For I am still poor, like our father before,
And he, full of riches and pride,
Leads a life of such show, there is no room, you know,
In the very fine carriage he gained by his marriage
For an old-fashioned brother to ride.
His wife, with her gold, gives him friends, I am told,
With whom she is rather too gay,—
The senator's son, who is ready to run
For her gloves and her fan, night or day,
And to gallop beside, when she wishes to ride:
Oh, no doubt 'tis an honor to see smile upon her
Such world-famous fellows as they!
Ah, brother of mine, while you sport, while you dine,
While you drink of your wine like a lord,
You might curse, one would say, and grow jaundiced and gray,
With such guests every day at your board!
But you sleek down your rage like a pard in its cage,
And blink in meek fashion through the bars of your passion,
As husbands like you can afford.
For still you must think, as you eat, as you drink,
As you hunt with your dogs and your guns,
How your pleasures are bought with the wealth that she brought,
And you were once hunted by duns.
Oh, I envy you not your more fortunate lot:
I've a wife all my own in my own little cot,
And with happiness, which is the only true riches,
The cup of our love overruns.
We have bright, rosy girls, fair as ever an earl's,
And the wealth of their curls is our gold;
Oh, their lisp and their laugh, they are sweeter by half
Than the wine that you quaff red and old!
We have love-lighted looks, we have work, we have books,
Our boys have grown manly and bold,
And they never shall blush, when their proud cousins brush
From the walls of their college such cobwebs of knowledge
As careless young fingers may hold.
Keep your pride and your cheer, for we need them not here,
And for me far too dear they would prove,
For gold is but gloss, and possessions are dross,
And gain is all loss, without love.
Yon severing tide is not fordless or wide,—
The soul's blue abysses our homesteads divide:
Down through the still river they deepen forever,
Like the skies it reflects from above.
Still my brother thou art, though our lives lie apart,
Path from path, heart from heart, more and more.
Oh, I have not forgot,—oh, remember you not
Our room in the cot by the shore?
And a night soon will come, when the murmur and hum
Of our days shall be dumb evermore,
And again we shall lie side by side, you and I,
Beneath the green cover you helped to lay over
Our honest old father of yore.
A HALF-LIFE AND HALF A LIFE.
"On garde longtemps son premier amant, quand on n'en prend point de
second."
Maximes Morales du Duc de la Rochefoucauld..
It is not suffering alone that wears out our lives. We sometimes are in a state when a sharp pang would be hailed almost as a blessing,—when, rather than bear any longer this living death of calm stagnation, we would gladly rush into action, into suffering, to feel again the warmth of life restored to our blood, to feel it at least coursing through our veins with something like a living swiftness.
This death-in-life comes sometimes to the most earnest men, to those whose life is fullest of energy and excitement It is the reaction, the weariness which they name Ennui,—foul fiend that eats fastest into the heart's core, that shakes with surest hand the sands of life, that makes the deepest wrinkles on the cheeks and deadens most surely the lustre of the eyes.
But what are the occasional visits of this life-consumer, this vampire that sucks out the blood, to his constant, never-failing presence? There are those who feel within themselves the power of living fullest lives, of sounding every chord of the full diapason of passion and feeling, yet who have been so hemmed around, so shut in by adverse and narrowing circumstances, that never, no, not once in their half-century of years which stretch from childhood to old age, have they been free to breathe out, to speak aloud the heart that was in them. Ever the same wasting indifference to the things that are, the same ill-repressed longing for the things that might be. Long days of wearisome repetition of duties in which there is no life, followed by restless nights, when Imagination seizes the reins in her own hands, and paints the out-blossoming of those germs of happiness and fulness of being of whose existence within us we carry about always the aching consciousness.
And such things I have known from the moment when I first stepped from babyhood into childhood, from the time when life ceased to be a play and came to have its duties and its sufferings. Always the haunting sense of a happiness which I was capable of feeling, faint glimpses of a paradise of which I was a born denizen,—and always, too, the stern knowledge of the restraints which held me prisoner, the idle longings of an exile. But would no strong effort of will, no energy of heart or mind, break the bonds that held me down,—no steady perseverance of purpose win me a way out of darkness into light? No, for I was a woman, an ugly woman, whose girlhood had gone by without affection, and whose womanhood was passing without love,—a woman, poor and dependent on others for daily bread, and yet so bound by conventional duties to those around her that to break from them into independence would be to outrage all the prejudices of those who made her world.
I could plan such escape from my daily and yearly narrowing life, could dream of myself walking steadfast and unshaken through labor to independence, could picture a life where, if the heart were not fed, at least the tastes might be satisfied, could strengthen myself through all the imaginary details of my going-forth from the narrow surroundings which made my prison-walls; but when the time came to take the first step, my courage failed. I could not go out into that world which looked to me so wide and lonely; the necessity for love was too strong for me, I must dwell among mine own people. There, at least, was the bond of custom, there was the affection which grows out of habit; but in the world what hope had I to win love from strangers, with my repellent looks, awkward movements, and want of personal attractions?