The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864

Haunting her temple, filled with love and awe,
To thy responsive youth
The harmonies of her benignant law
Revealed consoling truth.

Thenceforth, when toiling in the grasp of Care
Amid the eager throng,
A votive seer, her greetings thou didst bear,
Her oracles prolong.

The vagrant winds and the far heaving main
Breathed in thy chastened rhyme,
Their latent music to the soul again,
Above the din of time.

The seasons, at thy call, renewed the spell
That thrilled our better years,
The primal wonder o'er our spirits fell,
And woke the fount of tears.

And Faith's monition, like an organ's strain,
Followed the sea-bird's flight,
The river's bounteous flow, the ripening grain,
And stars' unfathomed light.

In the dank woods and where the meadows gleam,
The lowliest flower that smiled
To wisdom's vigil or to fancy's dream
Thy gentle thought beguiled.

They win fond glances in the prairie's sweep,
And where the moss-clumps lie,
A welcome find when through the mould they creep,
A requiem when they die.

Unstained thy song with passion's fitful hues
Or pleasure's reckless breath,
For Nature's beauty to thy virgin muse
Was solemnized by death.

O'er life's majestic realm and dread repose,
Entranced with holy calm,
From the rapt soul of boyhood then uprose
The memorable psalm.

And roaming lone beneath the woodland shades,
Thy meditative prayer
In the umbrageous aisles and choral glades
We murmur unaware;

Or track the ages with prophetic cheer,
Lured by thy chant sublime,
Till bigotry and kingcraft disappear
In Freedom's chosen clime,—

While on her ramparts with intrepid mien,
O'er faction's angry sea,
Thy voice proclaims, undaunted and serene,
The watchwords of the free.

Not in vague tones or tricks of verbal art
The plaint and pæan rung:
Thine the clear utterance of an earnest heart,
The limpid Saxon tongue.

Our country's minstrel! in whose crystal verse
With tranquil joy we trace
Her native glories, and the tale rehearse
Of her primeval race,—

Blest are thy laurels, that unchallenged crown
Worn brow and silver hair,
For truth and manhood consecrate renown,
And her pure triumph share!

HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS

BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD

X

Our gallant Bob Stephens, into whose life-boat our Marianne has been received, has lately taken the mania of house-building into his head. Bob is somewhat fastidious, difficult to please, fond of domesticities and individualities; and such a man never can fit himself into a house built by another, and accordingly house-building has always been his favorite mental recreation. During all his courtship as much time was taken up in planning a future house as if he had money to build one, and all Marianne's patterns, and the backs of half their letters, were scrawled with ground-plans and elevations. But latterly this chronic disposition has been quickened into an acute form by the falling-in of some few thousands to their domestic treasury,—left as the sole residuum of a painstaking old aunt, who took it into her head to make a will in Bob's favor, leaving, among other good things, a nice little bit of land in a rural district half an hour's railroad-ride from Boston.

So now ground-plans thicken, and my wife is being consulted morning, noon, and night, and I never come into the room without finding their heads close together over a paper, and hearing Bob expatiate on his favorite idea of a library. He appears to have got so far as this, that the ceiling is to be of carved oak, with ribs running to a boss overhead, and finished mediævally with ultramarine blue and gilding,—and then away he goes sketching Gothic patterns of book-shelves which require only experienced carvers, and the wherewithal to pay them, to be the divinest things in the world.

Marianne is exercised about china-closets and pantries, and about a bed-room on the ground-door,—for, like all other women of our days, she expects not to have strength enough to run up-stairs oftener than once or twice a week; and my wife, who is a native genius in this line, and has planned in her time dozens of houses for acquaintances, wherein they are at this moment living happily, goes over every day with her pencil and ruler the work of rearranging the plans, according as the ideas of the young couple veer and vary.

One day Bob is importuned to give two feet off from his library for a closet in the bed-room,—but resists like a Trojan. The next morning, being mollified by private domestic supplications, Bob yields, and my wife rubs out the lines of yesterday, two feet come off the library, and a closet is constructed. But now the parlor proves too narrow,—the parlor-wall must be moved two feet into the hall. Bob declares this will spoil the symmetry of the latter, and if there is anything he wants, it is a wide, generous, ample hall to step into when you open the front-door.

"Well, then," says Marianne, "let's put two feet more into the width of the house."

"Can't, on account of the expense, you see," says Bob. "You see, every additional foot of outside wall necessitates so many more bricks, so much more flooring, so much more roofing, etc."

And my wife, with thoughtful brow, looks over the plans, and considers how two feet more are to be got into the parlor without moving any of the walls.

"I say," says Bob, bending over her shoulder, "here, take your two feet in the parlor, and put two more feet on to the other side of the hall-stairs"; and he dashes heavily with his pencil.

"Oh, Bob!" exclaims Marianne, "there are the kitchen-pantries! you ruin them,—and no place for the cellar-stairs!"