Bitter-Sweet

Excerpt

PICTURE.

  Winter's wild birthnight! In the fretful East
  The uneasy wind moans with its sense of cold,
  And sends its sighs through gloomy mountain gorge,
  Along the valley, up the whitening hill,
  To tease the sighing spirits of the pines,
  And waste in dismal woods their chilly life.
  The sky is dark, and on the huddled leaves—
  The restless, rustling leaves—sifts down its sleet,
  Till the sharp crystals pin them to the earth,
  And they grow still beneath the rising storm.
  The roofless bullock hugs the sheltering stack,
  With cringing head and closely gathered feet,
  And waits with dumb endurance for the morn.
  Deep in a gusty cavern of the barn
  The witless calf stands blatant at his chain;
  While the brute mother, pent within her stall,
  With the wild stress of instinct goes distraught,
  And frets her horns, and bellows through the night.
  The stream runs black; and the far waterfall
  That sang so sweetly through the summer eyes,
  And swelled and swayed to Zephyr's softest breath,
  Leaps with a sullen roar the dark abyss,
  And howls its hoarse responses to the wind.
  The mill is still. The distant factory,
  That swarmed yestreen with many-fingered life,
  And bridged the river with a hundred bars
  Of molten light, is dark, and lifts its bulk,
  With dim, uncertain angles, to the sky.

* * * * *

  Yet lower bows the storm. The leafless trees
  Lash their lithe limbs, and, with majestic voice,
  Call to each other through the deepening gloom;
  And slender trunks that lean on burly boughs
  Shriek with the sharp abrasion; and the oak,
  Mellowed in fiber by unnumbered frosts,
  Yields to the shoulder of the Titan Blast,
  Forsakes its poise, and, with a booming crash,
  Sweeps a fierce passage to the smothered rocks,
  And lies a shattered ruin.

* * * * *

                                Other scene:—
  Across the swale, half up the pine-capped hill,
  Stands the old farmhouse with its clump of barns—
  The old red farmhouse—dim and dun to-night,
  Save where the ruddy firelights from the hearth
  Flap their bright wings against the window panes,—
  A billowy swarm that beat their slender bars,
  Or seek the night to leave their track of flame
  Upon the sleet, or sit, with shifting feet
  And restless plumes, among the poplar boughs—
  The spectral poplars, standing at the gate.

  And now a man, erect, and tall, and strong,
  Whose thin white hair, and cheeks of furrowed bronze,
  And ancient dress, betray the patriarch,
  Stands at the window, listening to the storm;
  And as the fire leaps with a wilder flame—
  Moved by the wind—it wraps and glorifies
  His stalwart frame, until it flares and glows
  Like the old prophets, in transfigured guise,
  That shape the sunset for cathedral aisles.
  And now it passes, and a sweeter shape
  Stands in its place. O blest maternity...!