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the dark quiet, unseen, and unknown; and I was glad to have it so. Somehow there was an undefinable charm in holding this relation to a person in whom I had so large an interest. It was so much better to feel that I knew her than it would have been to realize that she knew me. It seemed as if formal words would have taken away all this charm. Whenever my hand was upon the handle of the door, I drew it away again and said, 'Wait!'

"When I heard the next morning that she was gone, I was sorry not sorry that I had not spoken to her, but only sorry that she was gone. The place had lost half its beauty for me."

Alice, who had promised a dear friend to visit her in her home in Northern Vermont, went thither from Northampton. Faithful hands served her, strong, gentle arms bore her on, in this last struggle for life. "How I was ever to get out of the cars, I did not know; the thought of it filled me with dread and terror," she said, "but there was to lift me out and

carry me to the carriage. I never felt a jar, and when I sat down in the bay-window, and saw the view before it, and felt the loving kindness which enveloped me, it seemed as if I had reached heaven."

These words are written in that room in which she sat by the window where she afterwards wrote her "Invalid's Plea." From this bay window in which she sat, she looked through a vista of maples out upon a broad expanse of meadow-lawn, whose velvet turf is of the most vivid malachite green, softened on its farther edge by a grove wherein the shades of spruce and pine, elm and maple, contrast and blend. Beyond these woods Lake Memphremagog sets its glit

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LONGINGS FOR SUMMER REST.

139

tering shield between the hills. On its farther side green mountains arise till they hold the white clouds on their heads. Below, Jay Peak stands over four thousand feet above the sea, while above, Owl's Head soars over three thousand, covered with forest to its summit. It is a picture fit for Paradise. Yet it is but one glimpse amid many of the inexpressible beauty of this lake and mountain country of the North. She, sitting here, looked out upon this consummate scene; looked with her tender, steadfast eyes across these emerald meadows, to the lake shining upon her through the opening hills, to the mountains smiling down on her from the distant heaven, their keen amethyst notching the deep, deep blue of a cloudless sky. The splendor of this northern world fell upon her like a new, divine revelation. The tonic in its atmosphere touched her feeble pulses; the peace brooding in its stillness penetrated her aching brain with the promise of a new life. Without, the world was full of tranquillity; within, it was full of affection and the words of loving kindness. Then she wondered (and her wonder was sad with a hopeless regret) why summer after summer she had lingered in her city home, till the crash and roar of the streets, coming through her open windows, had filled body and brain with torture.

"How blind I was!" she exclaimed.

"I said that

and now life

How much

I could not take the time from my work; has neither time nor work left for me. more, how much better I could have worked, had I rested. If I am spared, how differently I will do. I will come here every summer, and live.”

Alas! before another summer, the winter snow had

wrapped her forever from the earthly sight of this unutterable beauty.

Hers from the beginning was the fatal mistake of so many brain-workers — that all time given to refreshment and rest is so much taken from the results of labor; forgetting, or not realizing, that the finer the instrument, the more fatal the effects of undue strain, the more imperative the necessity of avoiding overwear and the perpetual jar of discordant conditions; forgetting, also, that the rarest flowering of the brain has its root in silence and beauty and rest.

Here in this window, whither she, wasted and suffering, had been borne by.gentle arms, our dear friend wrote her "Invalid's Plea," one of the most touching of her many touching lyrics:

"O Summer! my beautiful, beautiful Summer,
I look in thy face and I long so to live;
But ah! hast thou room for an idle new-comer,
With all things to take and with nothing to give?
With all things to take of thy dear loving kindness-
The wine of thy sunshine, the dew of thy air;

And with nothing to give but the deafness and blind

ness

Begot in the depths of an utter despair?

The little green grasshopper, weak as we deem her,
Chirps day in and out for the sweet right to live;
And canst thou, O Summer! make room for a
dreamer,

With all things to take and with nothing to give-
Room only to wrap her hot cheeks in thy shadows,
And all on thy daisy-fringed pillow to lie,
And dream of the gates of the glorious meadows,
Where never a rose of the roses shall die?

DEATH AND BURIAL.

141

CHAPTER VIII.

ALICE'S DEATH AND BURIAL.

WHEN a dear one, dying willingly, lets go of life, the loosened hands by so much reconcile us to their going. It was not so with Alice. Through physical suffering almost beyond precedent, through days and nights and years of hopeless illness, she yet clung to this life. Not through any lack of faith in the other and higher; but because it seemed to her that she had not yet exhausted the possibilities, the fullness, and sweetness of this. She thought that there was a fruition in life, in its labor, its love, which she had never realized; and even in dying she longed for it.

The autumn before her death, in a poem entitled, "The Flight of the Birds," she uttered this prayer :·

"Therefore I pray, and can but pray,

Lord, keep and bring them back when May
Shall come, with shining train,

Thick 'broiderèd with leaves of wheat,
And butterflies, and field-pinks sweet,
And yellow bees, and rain.

"Yea, bring them back across the seas In clouds of golden witnesses

The grand, the grave, the gay;

And, if thy holy will it be,

Keep me alive, once more to see

The glad and glorious day."

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It could not be. "The golden witnesses could only chant their spring music above her couch of final rest. Yet within one month of death, she was busier than ever with plans of happiness for others. "O! if God only could let me live ten years longer," she said ; "it seems as if I wouldn't ask for any more time. I would live such a different life. I would never shut myself up in myself again. Then I would do something for my friends!

Phoebe, writing of her last days, says:—

“Though loving and prizing whatever is good and lovely here, and keeping firm and tender hold of the things that are seen, yet she always reached one hand to grasp the unseen and eternal. She believed that God is not far from any one of us, and that the sweet communion of friends who are only separated by the shadowy curtain of death, might still remain unbroken.

"During her last year of illness she delighted much in the visits of her friends; entered with keenest zest into their hopes and plans, and liked to hear of all that was going on in the world from which she was now shut. She talked much of a better country with those who came to talk to her upon the land to which her steps drew near; and so catholic and free from prejudice was her spirit, that many of those friends whom she loved best, and with whom she held the most sacred communion, differed widely from herself in their religious faith.

"She loved to listen to the reading of poetry and of

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