"Home, bear me home at last," he said,
"And lay me where my dead are lying;
But not while skies are overspread,
And mournful wintry winds are sighing.
"Wait till the royal march of Spring
Carpets your mountain fastness over,--
Till chattering birds are on the wing,
And buzzing bees are in the clover.
"Wait till the laurel bursts its buds,
And creeping ivy flings its graces
About the lichened rocks, and floods
Of sunshine fill the shady places.
"Then, when the sky, the air, the grass,
Sweet Nature all, is glad and tender,
Then bear me through the Goshen Pass
Amid its flush of May-day splendor."
So _will_ we bear him! Human heart
To the warm earth's drew never nearer,
And never stooped she to impart
Lessons to one who held them dearer.
Stars lit new pages for him; seas
Revealed the depths their waves were screening;
The ebbs gave up their masteries,
The tidal flows confessed their meaning.
Of ocean paths the tangled clue
He taught the nations to unravel;
And mapped the track where safely through
The lightning-footed thought might travel.
And yet unflattered by the store
Of these supremer revelations,
Who bowed more reverently before
The lowliest of earth's fair creations?
What sage of all the ages past,
Ambered in Plutarch's limpid story,
Upon the age he served, has cast
A radiance touched with worthier glory?
His noble living for the ends
God set him (duty underlying
Each thought, word, action) naught transcends
In lustre, save his nobler dying.
Do homage, sky, and air, and grass,
All things he cherished, sweet and tender,
As through our gorgeous mountain pass
We bear him in the May-day splendor!
The summer of 1884 Margaret Preston spent abroad in the places of
which she had read with a loving enthusiasm which made them her own.
"Don't show me; let me find it," she would say, and go straight to the
object of her quest. Her reading had brought her into companionship
with all the beautiful minds of the world, and all the places that had
been dear to them were sacred to her heart. Windermere was "redolent
all over with the memories of Wordsworth, Southey, Kit North, Hartley
Coleridge, Harriet Martineau, Dr. Arnold." "Ambleside--Wordsworth's
Ambleside--Southey's; and such hills, such greenery, I never expect to
see again. Then we took carriage to Grasmere Lake, a lovely little
gem."
"I walked to Wordsworth's grave without being directed, and on reading
his name on his stone, and Mary Wordsworth's on his wife's, I am free
to confess to a rush of tears, Dora Quillinan, his daughter's, and
dear old Dorothy, whom Coleridge, you know, pronounced the grandest
woman he had ever known. Suddenly turning I read the name of poor
Hartley Coleridge and again I felt my eyes flow."
Perhaps few travellers have seen as much in a summer's wandering as
did Margaret Preston, yet it was on her "blind slate" that she was
forced to write of these things and of the "crowning delight of the
summer," the tour through Switzerland. She said, "My picture gallery
of memory is hung henceforth with glorious frescoes which blindness
cannot blot or cause to fade."
Life in Preston House with all its enchantments came to an end for
Margaret Preston with the passing of the noble and loving man who had
made her the priestess of that home shrine. The first two years after
his death she spent with her stepdaughter, Mrs. Allan, who lived near
the old home. Then she went to the home of Dr. George J. Preston, of
Baltimore, where she was the centre of the home and took great delight
in his children with their pretty "curly red heads." She never walked
again except to take a few steps with a crutch.
From 819 North Charles Street she wrote: "Here my large airy room
faces brick walls and housetops and when I sit at the library windows
I only see throngs of passers-by, all of whom are strangers to me."
Her life was beautiful and content, but she must often have longed for
the old friends and the "laureled avenues" and the "edges of the
glorious Goshen Pass lit with the wavering flames of the July
rhododendrons."
March 29, 1897, Margaret Preston died as she had wished when she
expressed her desire in her poem "Euthanasia," written in memory of a
friend who had passed away unconscious of illness or death:
With faces the dearest in sight,
With a kiss on the lips I love best,
To whisper a tender "Good-night"
And pass to my pillow of rest.
To kneel, all my service complete,
All duties accomplished--and then
To finish my orisons sweet
With a trustful and joyous "Amen."
And softly, when slumber was deep,
Unwarned by a shadow before,
On a halcyon billow of sleep
To float to the Thitherward shore.
Without a farewell or a tear,
A sob or a flutter of breath,
Unharmed by the phantom of Fear,
To glide through the darkness of death!
Just so would I choose to depart,
Just so let the summons be given;
A quiver--a pause of the heart--
A vision of angels--then Heaven!
"THE 'MOTHER' OF 'ST. ELMO'"