Her hands are cold; her face is white;
No more her pulses come and go;
Her eyes are shut to life and light;——
Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
And lay her where the violets blow.
But not beneath a graven stone,
To plead for tears with alien eyes;
A slender cross of wood alone
Shall say, that here a maiden lies
In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
And gray old trees of hugest limb
Shall wheel their circling shadows round
To make the scorching sunlight dim
That drinks the greenness from the ground,
And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
When o’er their boughs the squirrels run,
And through their leaves the robins call,
And, ripening in the autumn sun,
The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
Doubt not that she will heed them all.
For her the morning choir shall sing
Its matins from the branches high,
And every minstrel-voice of spring,
That trills beneath the April sky,
Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
When, turning round their dial-track,
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
Her little mourners, clad in black,
The crickets, sliding through the grass,
Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
At last the rootlets of the trees
Shall find the prison where she lies,
And bear the buried dust they seize
In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
So may the soul that warmed it rise!
If any, born of kindlier blood,
Should ask, What maiden lies below?
Say only this: A tender bud,
That tried to blossom in the snow,
Lies withered where the violets blow.
——I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down. The world is always
ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what
to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly
while the world slips the collar over it. It backs into the shafts like a
lamb. It draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of the
whip. But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes
it hard to train.
X.
Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
family, and that she is afraid she has it. Those who are so endowed look
upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him. According to the degree
to which it covers him, his death will be near or more remote. It is an
awful faculty; but science gives one too much like it. Luckily for our
friends, most of us who have the scientific second-sight school ourselves
not to betray our knowledge by word or look.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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