The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 74, December, 1863

He gathered up the boy, holding him close to his bony chest.

"I'd like to think," he said. "I could atone for that waste, Jane. It was my fault. I'd like to think I'd earn up yonder that cross of the Legion of Honor—through him."

"God knows," she said.

After that they were silent a long while, They were thinking of Him who had brought the little child to them.

A LOYAL WOMAN'S NO

No! is my answer from this cold, bleak ridge
Down to your valley: you may rest you there:
The gulf is wide, and none can build a bridge
That your gross weight would safely hither bear.

Pity me, if you will. I look at you
With something that is kinder far than scorn,
And think, "Ah, well! I might have grovelled, too;
I might have walked there, fettered and forsworn."

I am of nature weak as others are;
I might have chosen comfortable ways;
Once from these heights I shrank, beheld afar,
In the soft lap of quiet, easy days.

I might—(I will not hide it)—once I might
Have lost, in the warm whirlpools of your voice,
The sense of Evil, the stern cry of Right;
But Truth has steered me free, and I rejoice:

Not with the triumph that looks back to jeer
At the poor herd that call their misery bliss;
But as a mortal speaks when God is near,
I drop you down my answer; it is this:—

I am not yours, because you seek in me
What is the lowest in my own esteem:
Only my flowery levels can you see,
Nor of my heaven-smit summits do you dream.

I am not yours, because you love yourself:
Your heart has scarcely room for me beside.
I could not be shut in with name and pelf;
I spurn the shelter of your narrow pride!

Not yours,—because you are not man enough
To grasp your country's measure of a man!
If such as you, when Freedom's ways are rough,
Cannot walk in them, learn that women can!

Not yours, because, in this the nation's need,
You stoop to bend her losses to your gain,
And do not feel the meanness of your deed:
I touch no palm defiled with such a stain!

Whether man's thought can find too lofty steeps
For woman's scaling, care not I to know;
But when he falters by her side, or creeps,
She must not clog her soul with him to go.

Who weds me must at least with equal pace
Sometimes move with me at my being's height:
To follow him to his more glorious place,
His purer atmosphere, were keen delight.

You lure me to the valley: men should call
Up to the mountains, where the air is clear.
Win me and help me climbing, if at all!
Beyond these peaks rich harmonies I hear,—

The morning chant of Liberty and Law!
The dawn pours in, to wash out Slavery's blot:
Fairer than aught the bright sun ever saw
Rises a nation without stain or spot.

The men and women mated for that time
Tread not the soothing mosses of the plain;
Their hands are joined in sacrifice sublime;
Their feet firm set in upward paths of pain.

Sleep your thick sleep, and go your drowsy way!
You cannot hear the voices in the air!
Ignoble souls will shrivel in that day:
The brightness of its coming can you bear?

For me, I do not walk these hills alone:
Heroes who poured their blood out for the Truth,
Women whose hearts bled, martyrs all unknown,
Here catch the sunrise of immortal youth

On their pale cheeks and consecrated brows!
It charms me not,—your call to rest below:
I press their hands, my lips pronounce their vows
Take my life's silence for your answer: No!

EUGENE DELACROIX

The death of Eugene Delacroix cuts the last bond between the great artistic epoch which commenced with the Bellini and that which had its beginning with the nineteenth century, epochs as diverse in character as the Venice of 1400 and the Paris of 1800. In him died the last great painter whose art was moulded by the instincts and traditions that made Titian and Veronese, and the greatest artist whose eyes have opened on the, to him, uncongenial and freezing life of the nineteenth century. In our time we have a new ideal, a new and maybe a higher development of intellectual art, and as great a soul as Titian's might to-day reach farther towards the reconciled perfections of graphic art: but what he did no one can now do; the glory of that time has passed away,—its unreasoning faith, its wanton instinct, revelling in Art like children in the sunshine, and rejoicing in childlike perception of the pomp and glory which overlay creation, unconscious of effort, indifferent to science,—all gone with the fairies, the saints, the ecstatic visions which framed their poor lives in gold. Only, still reflecting the glory, as eastern mountains the sunken sun, came a few sympathetic souls kindling into like glow, with faint perception of what had passed from the whole world beside. Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and Delacroix, kept the line of color, now at last utterly extinguished. Now we reason, now we see facts; sentiment is out of joint, and appearances are known to be liars; we have found the greater substance; we kindle with the utilities, and worship with the aspiring spirit of a common humanity; we banish the saints from our souls and the gewgaws from our garments, and walk clothed and in our right minds in what we believe to be the noonday light of reason and science. We are humanitarian, enlightened. We begin to comprehend the great problems of human existence and development; our science touches the infinitely removed, and apprehends the mysteries of macrocosmic organism: but we have lost the art of painting; for, when Eugene Delacroix died, the last painter (visible above the man) who understood Art as Titian understood it, and painted with such eyes as Veronese's, passed away, leaving no pupil or successor. It is as when the last scion of a kingly race dies in some alien land. Greater artists than he we may have in scores; but he was of the Venetians, and, with his nearly rival, Turner, lived to testify that it was not from a degeneracy of the kind that we have no more Tintorets and Veroneses; for both these, if they had lived in the days of those, had been their peers.