As a 1914 Christmas offering, Margaret Perkins, a Hutchinson High School
teacher, gave us her volume of beautiful poems. "The Love Letters of a
Norman Princess" is the love story, in verse, of Hersilie, a ward
and relative of William, The Conqueror, and Eric, a kinsman of the
unfortunate King Harold.
"I thought once, in a dream, that Love
came near
With silken flutter of empurpled wings
That wafted faint, strange fragrance from
the things
Abloom where age and season never
sear.
The joy of mating birds was in my ear,
And flamed my path with dancing daffodils
Whose splendor melted into greening hills
Upseeking, like my spirit, to revere."
"Before you came, this heart of mine
A fairy garden seemed
With lavender and eglantine;
And lovely lilies gleamed
Above the purple-pansy sod
Where ruthless passion never trod."
"If Heaven had been pleased to let you be
A keeper of the sheep, a peasant me,
Within a shepherd's cottage thatched with
vine
Now might we know the bliss of days
divine."
--"We are part of Heaven's scheme,
You and I:
Child of sunshine and the dew
I was earthly--born as you.
"Yet my little hour I go,
Troubled maid,
Even where the storm blasts blow,
Unafraid;
Confident that from the sod
All things upward wend to God."
"Dear heart, the homing hour is here,
The task is done.
Toilers, and they who course the deer
Turn, one by one,
At day's demise,
Where dwells a deathless glow
In loving eyes.
I hear them hearthward go
To castle, or to cottage on the lea;
But him I love comes never home to me."
The peaks that rift the saffron sheen
Of sunset skies
In purple loveliness, when seen
By nearer eyes,
Are bleakly bare.
To brave those boulders gray
No climbers dare.
O, in some future may
This mountain mass of unfulfilled desires
Be unto me as yonder haloed spires!"
Miss Perkins is the compiler of "Echoes of Pawnee Rock," and writes
short stories and poems for the magazines. Some of her verse is
published in Woolard's "Father."