J. G. Holland

“ The room grows dim, and silently and soft
The veil is dropping 'twixt my eyes and yours,
Which soon will hide me from you—you from me.
Only one hand is warm; it rests in yours,
Whose full, sweet pulses throb along my arm,
So that I live upon them. Cling to me!
And thus your life, after my life is past,
Shall lay me gently in the arms of Death.
Thus shall you link your being with a soul
Gazing unveiled upon the Great White Throne.
Dear hearts of love surrounding me, farewell!
I cannot see you now; or, if I do,
You are transfigured. ”

“ I know men who have the reputation of being hard and harsh, yet who are, inside, and in their own consciousness, as gentle and sensitive as women—who put on a stern air and a repellent manner, when they are really yearning for sympathy. I have seen this air and manner broken through and battered down by a friendly man, who found what he suspected behind it—a generous, warm, noble heart. This perverseness seems to be akin to that of the miser who knows he is rich, takes his highest delight in being rich, and yet dresses meanly, and fares like a beggar rather than be thought rich. ”

“ Grace.
I am ashamed,—
In truth I am ashamed—to tell you all.
You will not laugh at me?
Mary.
I laugh at you?
Grace.
Forgive me, Mary, for my heart is weak;
Distrustful of itself and all the world.
Ah, well! To what strange issues leads our life!
It seems but yesterday that you were brought
To this old house, an orphaned little girl,
Whose large shy eyes, pale cheeks, and shrinking ways
Filled all our hearts with wonder, as we stood
And stared at you, until your heart o'erfilled
With the oppressive strangeness, and you wept. ”

“ The cloth-of-gold she knelt upon grew lusterless and bare,
And all the place was cooler in the darkness of her hair.
And while she knelt in queenly pride and beauty strange and wild,
And held her breast with both her palms and looked on him and smiled,
She seemed no more of common earth, but Casyapa's child.
He bent to her as thus she smiled; he kissed her lifted cheek;
"Oh Nourmahal," he murmured low, "more dear than I can speak,
I'm weary of my lonely life: give me the rest I seek." ”

“ Have loved and followed him, have been man's slaves,—
The victims of his power and his desire.
Mary.
And you, a wedded wife-well wedded, too,
Can say all this, and say it bitterly!
Grace.
Perhaps because a wife; perhaps because—
Mary.
Hush, Grace! No more! I beg you, say no more.
Nay! I will leave you at another word;
For I could listen to a blasphemy,
Falling from bestial lips, with lighter chill
Than to the mad complainings of a soul
Which God has favored as he favors few.
I dare not listen when a woman's voice,
Which blessings strive to smother, flings them off
In mad contempt. ”

“ How many homes are scattered over Christendom in which no good seed is sown! How many selfish, niggardly, vicious parents are there, who, producing after their kind, by generation and by influence, are filling the world with selfish, niggardly, and vicious children! How many homes are there in which the gentle words of love are never heard; in which the tender graces of a Christian heart are never unfolded; in which a prayer is never uttered! How many fathers are there whose lips are black with profanity and foul with obscenity, and whose lives are mean and unwholesome! ”

“ And stem the hisses that they dare,
And modest truth and beauty save.
No woman, in her soul, is she
Who longs to poise above the roar
Of motley multitudes, and be
The idol at whose feet they pour
The wine of their idolatry.
Coarse labor makes its doer coarse;
Great burdens harden softest hands;
A gentle voice grows harsh and hoarse
That warns and threatens and commands
Beyond the measure of its force.
Oh sweet, beyond all speech, to feel
Within no answer to the drum,
Or echo to the bugle-peal,
That calls to duties which benumb
In service of the commonweal! ”

“ She knew that no one loved her for anything good that she possessed, and knew that her own heart was barren of love for others. She felt that a little child who would call her "mother," clinging to her hand, or nestling in her bosom, could redeem her to her better self; and how could she help thinking of the true men who, with their hearts in their fresh, manly hands, had prayed for her love in the dawn of her young beauty, and been spurned from her presence—men now in the honorable walks of life with their little ones around them? ”

“ I call him husband; and he calls me wife;
And I, who once was like an April day,
That finds quick tears in every cloud, have steeled
My heart against my fate, and now am calm.
I will live on; and though these simple folk
Who call me sister understand me not,
It matters little. There is one who does;
And he shall have no liberty of love
By any word of mine. 'Tis woman's lot,
And man's most weak and wicked wantonness.
Mine is like other husbands, I suppose;
No worse—no better.
Mary.
Ask you sympathy
Of such as I? I cannot give it you,
For you have shut me from the privilege.
Grace. ”

“ Oh sweetest flowers! Oh flowers that hold
The fragrant life of Paradise
For a brief day, shut told in fold,
That we may drink it in a trice,
And drop the empty pink and gold!
Oh sweetest flowers, that have a breath
For every passion that we feel!
That tell us what the Master saith
Of blessing, in our woe and weal,
And all events of life and death!
IV. The time of roses came again;
And one had bloomed within the manse,
Bloomed in a burst of midnight pain,
And plumed its life in fair expanse,
Beneath love's nursing sun and rain. ”

“ What can He think when man and woman, the glory and crown of His creation, are entirely overtopped and thrown into the shade by birds and bees and blossoms, and go poking around the world in unexampled and ingeniously contrived ugliness? What does He think of men and women who take that passion of love, which was intended to make them happy, and give them sweet companionship, and bear young children to their arms, and trample it under their feet as an unholy thing, and to welcome to their hearts, in its stead, blackness, and darkness, and tempest? ”

“ Jim pauses as if about to make some further remark, thinks better of it, and then, putting his big arm around his little wife, leads her off, up stairs.
The lights of the great house go out one after another, the cataracts sing the inmates to sleep, the summer moon witches with the mist, the great, sweet heaven bends over the dreaming town, and there we leave our friends at rest, to take up the burden of their lives again upon the happy morrow, beyond our feeble following, but still under the loving eye and guiding hand to which we confidently and gratefully commit them. ”

“ Who never sows a good the second time
Till the torn bosom of the graceless soil
Is ready for the seed.
Grace.
Oh, could you know
The anguish of my heart, you would not chide!
If I repine, it is because my lot
Is not the blessed thing it seems to you.
O Mary! Could you know! Could you but know!
Mary.
Then why not tell me all? You know me, love.
And know that secrets make their graves with me.
So, tell me all; for I do promise you
Such sympathy as God through suffering
Has given me power to grant to such as you. ”

“ So, if I may not believe in a "pistareen Providence," I must make a God of the universe itself, or pass into the hands of many Gods the world's creation and governance. If the God that made the bee, and the ant, and the daisy, made me, then He is not above taking care of me, and of maintaining an interest in the smallest affairs of my life. The faith that lives in reason is never stronger than when it stands on flowers. There is not a fly that floats, nor a fish that swims, nor an animalcule that navigates its little drop of sea-spray, but bears a burden of hope to despairing humanity. ”

“ Marriage is freedom: only when
The husband turns the prison-key
Knows she herself; nor even then
Knows she more wisely well than he,
Who finds himself least wise of men.
New duties bring new powers to birth,
And new relations, new surprise
Of depths of weakness or of worth,
Until he doubt if her disguise
Mask more of heaven, or more of earth.
Tears spring beneath a careless touch;
Endurance hardens with a word ”

“ Is the temptation of the soul to sin,
Resisted, and re-conquered, evermore.
Ruth.
I am content; and now that I have caught
Bright glimpses of the outlines of your scheme,
As of a landscape, graded to the sky,
And seen through trees while passing, I desire
No vision further till I make survey
In some good time when I may come alone,
And drink its beauty and its blessedness.
I've been forgetful in my earnestness,
And wearied everyone with talk. These boys
Are restive grown, or nodding in their chairs,
And older heads are set, as if for sleep. ”

“ What knows the charming wife whom we lay in the tomb, of the tears we shed above her, of the endearments we lavish upon her memory, and of the praises of her virtue with which we burden the ears of our friends? This same wife would have drunk such expressions during her life with satisfaction and gratification beyond expression. Why can death alone teach us that those whom we love are dear? ”

“ All men, however good, are weak, I thought;
And if I can arrest no beam of love
By right of nature or by leave of law,
I'll stain the glass! And the last words I said,
As I lay down upon my bed to dream,
Were those four words of sin: "I'll stain the glass!"
Grace.
Mary, I cannot hear you more; your tale,
So bitter and so passing pitiful
I have forgotten tears, and feel my eyes
Burn dry and hot with looking at your face,
Now gathers blackness, and grows horrible. ”

“ Both, as happy as the day,
Kissed, and rose, and flew away!
And for twice a thousand years,
Floating through the radiant ether,
Lived the happy glendoveers,
Of the other, jealous neither,—
Sapphire naught without the red,
Ruby still by blue bested.
But when weary of their life,
They came down to earth at even—
Purple husband, purple wife—
From the upper deeps of heaven,
And reclined upon the grass,
That their little lives might pass.
Wing to wing and arms enwreathed,
Sank they from their life's long dreaming;—
Into earth their souls they breathed ”

“ The world is fitted up with supplies for all the probable and possible wants of the human race. We are treading every day upon the lids of great secrets that await the wants of the larger style and finer type of life that lie before us. Discovery has but just begun, and will, I doubt not, be as rife in future ages as in this. There is no end of it: yet the world is a thing to be weighed and measured. It is so many miles around it, and so many miles through it. Never mind; it has more in it than humanity can exhaust. ”