Page:The Farmer's Bride (New Edition).djvu/46

 And it is forced from us with our last breath "Thy will be done"? If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things, As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings, Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings! The temperate, well-worn smile The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own: And afterwards the child's, for a little while, With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes So soon to change, and make you feel how quick The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick— (How does one though?) quite early on, Of long green pastures under placid skies, One might be walking now with patient truth. What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth, When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone?

There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen, With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat, The dainty head held high against the painted green And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half sweet. Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring To me to-day: a radiance on the wall, So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small, Sapless and lined like a dead leaf, All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief!

And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair— Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay—? Or could—with any one of the old crew, But oh! these boys! the solemn way They take you, and the things they say— This "I have only as long as you" When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two— Although at heart perhaps—God! if it were Only the face, only the hair!