Hiding the grandsire’s form; and the wheels of the sliding picture stop.
Gone, that stout old Hendrick, at last! and from miles around they came,—
Farmer, and squire, and whispering youths, recalling his manhood’s fame.
Dead: and the Van Ghelt manor closed, and the homestead acres leased;
For their owner had moved more near the town, where his daily tasks
increased,
Choosing a home on the blue Passaic, whence the Newark spires and lights
Were seen, and over the salt sea-marsh the shadows of Bergen Heights.
Back and forth from his city work, the lawyer, day by day,
With the press of eager and toiling men, followed his wonted way;
And Hugh,—he dallied with life at home, tending the garden and grounds;
But the mansion longed for a woman’s voice to soften its lonely sounds.
“Hugh,” said Hermann Van Ghelt, at length, “choose for yourself a wife,
Comely, and good, and of birth to match the mother who gave you life.
No words of woman have charmed my ear since last I heard her voice;
And of fairest and proudest maids her son should make a worthy choice.”
But now the young man’s wandering heart from the great world turned away,
To long for the healthful Monmouth meads, the shores of the breezy bay;
And often the scenes and mates he knew in boyhood he sought again,
And roamed through the well-known woods, and lay in the grass where he
once had lain.
III.
Ladies, in silks and laces,
Lunching with lips agleam,
Know you aught of the places
Yielding such fruit and cream?
South from your harbor-islands
Glisten the Monmouth hills;
There are the ocean highlands,
Lowland meadows and rills,
Berries in field and garden,
Trees with their fruitage low,
Maidens (asking your pardon)
Handsome as cities show.
Know you that, night and morning,
A beautiful water-fay,
Covered with strange adorning,
Crosses your rippling bay?
Her sides are white and sparkling;
She whistles to the shore;
Behind, her hair is darkling,
And the waters part before.
Lightly the waves she measures
Up to the wharves of the town;
There, unlading her treasures,
Lovingly puts them down.
Come with me, ladies; cluster
Here on the western pier;
Look at her jewels’ lustre,
Changed with the changing year!
First of the months to woo her,
June his strawberries flings
Over her garniture,
Bringing her exquisite things;
Rifling his richest casket;
Handing her, everywhere,
Garnets in crate and basket;
Knowing she soon will wear
Blackberry jet and lava,
Raspberries ruby-red,
Trinkets that August gave her,
Over her toilet spread.
After such gifts have faded,
Then the peaches are seen,—
Coral and ivory braided,
Fit for an Indian queen.
And September will send her,
Proud of his wealth, and bold,
Melons glowing in splendor,
Emeralds set with gold.
So she glides to the Narrows,
Where the forts are astir:
Her speed is a shining arrow’s!
Guns are silent for her.
So she glides to the ringing
Bells of the belfried town,
Kissing the wharves, and flinging
All of her jewels down.
Whence she gathers her riches,
Ladies, now would you see?
Leaving your city niches,
Wander awhile with me.
IV.
1. The strawberry-vines lie in the sun,
Their myriad tendrils twined in one;
Spread like a carpet of richest dyes,
The strawberry-field in sunshine lies.
Each timorous berry, blushing red,
Has folded the leaves above her head,
The dark, green curtains gemmed with dew;
But each blushful berry, peering through,
Shows like a flock of the underthread,—
The crimson woof of a downy cloth
Where the elves may kneel and plight their troth.
2. Run through the rustling vines, to show
Each picker an even space to go,
Leaders of twinkling cord divide
The field in lanes from side to side;
And here and there with patient care,
Lifting the leafage everywhere,
Rural maidens and mothers dot
The velvet of the strawberry-plot:
Fair and freckled, old and young,
With baskets at their girdles hung,
Searching the plants with no rude haste,
Lest berries should hang unpicked, and waste:—
Of the pulpy, odorous, hidden quest,
First gift of the fruity months, and best.
3. Crates of the laden baskets cool
Under the trees at the meadow’s edge,
Covered with grass and dripping sedge,
And lily-leaves from the shaded pool;
Filled, and ready to be borne
To market before the morrow morn.
Beside them, gazing at the skies,
Hour after hour a young man lies.
From the hillside, under the trees,
He looks across the field, and sees
The waves that ever beyond it climb,
Whitening the rye-slope’s early prime;
At times he listens, listlessly,
To the tree-toad singing in the tree,
Or sees the catbird peck his fill
With feathers adroop and roguish bill.
But often, with a pleased unrest,
He lifts his glances to the west,
Watching the kirtles, red and blue,
Which cross the meadow in his view;
And he hears, anon, the busy throng
Sing the Strawberry-Pickers’ Song:
4. “Rifle the sweets our meadows bear,
Ere the day has reached its nooning;
While the skies are fair, and the morning air
Awakens the thrush’s tuning.
“_Softly the rivulet’s ripples flow;_
_Dark is the grove that lovers know;_
_Here, where the whitest blossoms blow,_
_The reddest and ripest berries grow._
“Bend to the crimson fruit, whose stain
Is glowing on lips and fingers;
The sun has lain in the leafy plain,
And the dust of his pinions lingers.
“_Softly the rivulet’s ripples flow;_
_Dark is the grove that lovers know;_
_Here, where the whitest blossoms blow,_
_The reddest and ripest berries grow._
“Gather the cones which lie concealed,
With their vines your foreheads wreathing;
The strawberry-field its sweets shall yield
While the western winds are breathing.
“_Softly the rivulet’s ripples flow;_
_Dark is the grove that lovers know;_
_Here, where the whitest blossoms blow,_
_The reddest and ripest berries grow._”
5. From the far hillside comes again
An echo of the pickers’ strain.
Sweetly the group their cadence keep;
Swiftly their hands the trailers sweep;
The vines are stripped and the song is sung,
A joyous labor for old and young;
For the blithe children, gleaning behind
The women, marvellous treasures find.
6. From the workers a maiden parts:
The baskets at her waistband shine
With berries that look like bleeding hearts
Of a hundred lovers at her shrine;
No Eastern girl were girdled so well
With silken belt and silver bell.
Her slender form is tall and strong;
Her voice is the sweetest in the song;
Her brown hair, fit to wear a crown,
Loose from its bonnet ripples down.
Toward the crates, that lie in the shade
Of the chestnut copse at the edge of the glade,
She moves from her mates, through happy rows
Of the children loving her as she goes.
_Alice, our Alice!_ one and all,
Striving to stay her footsteps, call
(For children with skilful choice dispense
The largesse of their innocence);
But on, with a sister’s smile, she moves
Into the darkness of the groves,
And deftly, daintily, one by one,
Shelters her baskets from the sun,
Under the network, fresh and cool,
Of lily-leaves from the crystal pool.
7. Turning her violet eyes, their rays
Glistened full in the young man’s gaze;
And each at each, for a moment’s space,
Looked with a diffident surprise.
“Heaven!” thought Hugh, “what artless grace
That laborer’s daughter glorifies!
I never saw a fairer face,
I never heard a sweeter voice;
And oh! were she my father’s choice,
My father’s choice and mine were one
In the strawberry-field and morning sun.”
V.
Love, from that summer morn
Melting the souls of these two;
Love, which some of you know
Who read this poem to-day—
Is it the same desire,
The strong, ineffable joy,
Which Jacob and Rachel felt,
When he served her father long years,
And the years were swift as days—
So great was the love he bore?
Race, advancing with time,
Growing in thought and deed,
Mastering land and sea,
Say, does the heart advance,
Are its passions more pure and strong?
They, like Nature, remain,
No more and no less than of yore.
Whoso conquers the earth,
Winning its riches and fame,
Comes to the evening at last,
The sunset of threescore years,
Confessing that Love was real,
All the rest was a dream!
The sum of his gains is dross;
The song in his praise is mute;
The wreath of his laurels fades:
But the kiss of his early love
Still burns on his trembling lip,
The spirit of one he loved
Hallows his dreams at night.
A little while, and the scenes
Of the play of Life are closed;
Come, let us rest an hour,
And by the pleasant streams,
Under the fresh, green trees,
Let us walk hand in hand,
And think of the days that were.
VI.
1. On river and height and salty moors the haze of autumn fell,
And the cloud of a troubled joy enwrapt the face of Hugh as well,—
The spell of a secret haunt that far from home his footsteps drew;
A love which over the brow of youth the mask of manhood threw.
Birds of the air to the father, at length, the common rumor brought:
“Your son,” they sang, “in the cunning toils of a rustic lass is caught!”
“A fit betrothal,” the lawyer said, “must make these follies cease;
Which shall it be?—the banker’s ward?—Edith, the judge’s niece?”
“Father, I pray”—said Hugh. “O yes!” out-leapt the other’s mood,
“I hear of your wanton loiterings; they ill become your blood!
If you hold our name at such light worth, forbear to darken the life
Of this Alice Dale”—“No, Alice Van Ghelt! father, she is my wife.”
2. Worldlings, who say the eagle should mate with eagle, after his kind,
Nor have learned from what far and diverse cliffs the twain each other
find,
Yours is the old, old story, of age forgetting its wiser youth;
Of eyes which are keen for others’ good and blind to an inward truth.
But the pride which closed the father’s doors swelled in the young man’s
veins,
And he led his bride, in the sight of all, through the pleasant Monmouth
lanes,
To the little farm his grandsire gave, years since, for a birthday gift:
Unto such havens unforeseen the barks of our fortune drift!
There, for a happy pastoral year, he tilled the teeming field,
Scattered the marl above his land, and gathered the orchard’s yield;
And Alice, in fair and simple guise, kissed him at even-fall;
And her face was to him an angel’s face, and love was all in all.
—What is this light in the southern sky, painting a red alarm?
What is this trumpet call, which sounds through peaceful village and
farm,—
Jarring the sweet idyllic rest, stilling the children’s throng,
Hushing the cricket on the hearth, and the lovers’ evening song?
VII.
1. War! war! war!
Manning of forts on land and ships for sea;
Innumerous lips that speak the righteous wrath
Of days which have been and again may be;
Flashing of tender eyes disdaining tears;
A pause of men with indrawn breath,
Knowing it awful for the people’s will
Thus, thus to end the mellow years
Of harvest, growth, prosperity,
And bring the years of famine, fire, and death,
Though fear and a nation’s shame are more awful still.
2. War! war! war!
A thundercloud in the South in the early Spring,—
The launch of a thunderbolt; and then,
With one red flare, the lightning stretched its wing,
And a rolling echo roused a million men!
Then the ploughman left his field;
The smith, at his clanging forge,
Forged him a sword to wield.
From meadow, and mountain-gorge,
And the Western plains, they came,
Fronting the storm and flame.
War! war! war!
Heaven aid the right!
God nerve the hero’s arm in the fearful fight!
God send the women sleep, in the long, long night,
When the breasts on whose strength they leaned shall heave no more!
VIII.
1. Spake each mother to her son,
Ere an ancient field was won:
“Spartan, who me your mother call,
Our country is mother of us all;
In her you breathe, and move, and are.
In peace, for her to live—in war,
For her to die—is, gloriously,
A patriot to live and die!”
2. The times are now as grand as then
With dauntless women, earnest men;
For thus the mothers whom we know
Bade their sons to battle go;
And, with a smile, the loyal North
Sent her million freemen forth.
3. “What men should stronger-hearted be
Than we, who dwell by the open sea,
Tilling the lands our fathers won
In battle on the Monmouth Plains?
Ah! a memory remains,
Telling us what they have done,
Teaching us what we should do.
Let us send our rightful share,—
Hard-handed yeomen, horsemen rare,
A hundred riders fleet and true.”
4. A hundred horsemen, led by Hugh:
“Were he still here,” their captain thought,
“The brave old man who trained my youth,
What a leader he would make
Where the battle’s topmost billows break!
The crimes which brought our land to ruth,
How in his soul they would have wrought!
God help me, no deed of mine shall shame
The honor of my grandsire’s name;
And my father shall see how pure and good
Runs in these veins the olden blood.”
5. Shore and inland their men have sent:
Away, to the mounted regiment,
The silver-hazed Potomac heights,
The circling raids, the hundred fights,
The booth, the bivouac, the tent.
Away, from the happy Monmouth farms,
To noontide marches, night alarms,
Death in the shadowy oaken glades,
Emptied saddles, broken blades,—
All the turmoil that soldiers know
Who gallop to meet a mortal foe,
Some to conquer, some to fall:
War hath its chances for one and all.
6. Heroes, who render up their lives
On the country’s fiery altar-stone—
They do not offer themselves alone.
What shall become of the soldiers’ wives?
They stay behind in the lonely cots,
Weeding the humble garden-plots;
Some to speed the needle and thread,
For the soldiers’ children must be fed;
All to sigh, through the toilsome day,
And at night teach lisping lips to pray
For the fathers marching far away.
IX.
1. Cloud and flame on the dark frontier,
Veiling the hosts embattled there:
Peace, and a boding stillness, here,
Where the wives at home repeat their prayer.
2. The weary August days are long;
The locusts sing a plaintive song,
The cattle miss their master’s call
When they see the sunset shadows fall.
The youthful mistress, at even-tide,
Stands by the cedarn wicket’s side,
With both hands pushing from the front
Her hair, as those who listen are wont;
Gazing toward the unknown South,
While silent whispers part her mouth:
3. “O, if a woman could only find
Other work than to wait behind,
Through midnight dew and noonday drouth,—
To wait behind, and fear, and pray!
O, if a soldier’s wife could say,—
‘Where thou goest, I will go;
Kiss thee ere thou meet’st the foe;
Where thou lodgest, worst or best,
Share and soothe thy broken rest!’
—Alas, to stifle her pain, and wait,
This was ever a woman’s fate!
But the lonely hours at least may be
Passed a little nearer thee,
And the city thou guardest with thy life
Thou’lt guard more fondly for holding thy wife.”
4. Ah, tender heart of woman leal,
Supple as wax and strong as steel!
Thousands as faithful and as lone,
Following each some dearest one,
Found in those early months a home
Under the brightness of that dome
Whose argent arches for aye enfold
The hopes of a people in their hold,—
Irradiate, in the sight of all
Who guard the Capital’s outer wall.
Lastly came one, amid the rest,
Whose form a sunburnt soldier prest,
As lovers embrace in respite lent
From unfulfilled imprisonment.
And Alice found a new content:
Dearer for perils that had been
Were short-lived meetings, far between;
Better, for dangers yet to be,
The moments she still his face could see.
These, for the pure and loving wife,
Were the silver bars that marked her life,
That numbered the days melodiously;
While, through all noble daring, Hugh
From a Captain to a Colonel grew,
And his praises sweetened every tongue
That reached her ear,—for old and young
Gave him the gallant leader’s due.
X.
1. Flight of a meteor through the sky,
Scattering firebrands, arrows, and death,—
A baleful year, that hurtled by
While ancient kingdoms held their breath.
2. The Capital grew aghast with sights
Flashed from the lurid river-heights,
Full of the fearful things sent down,
By demons haunting the middle air,
Into the hot, beleaguered town,—
All woful sights and sounds, which seem
The fantasy of a sickly dream:
Crowded wickedness everywhere;
Everywhere a stifled sense
Of the noonday-striding pestilence;
Every church, from wall to wall,
A closely-mattressed hospital;
And ah! our bleeding heroes, brought
From smouldering fields so vainly fought,
Filling each place where a man could lie
To gasp a dying wish—and die;
While the sombre sky, relentlessly,
Covered the town with a funeral-pall,
A death-damp, trickling funeral-pall.
3. Always the dust and mire; the sound
Of the rumbling wagon’s ceaseless round,
The cannon jarring the trampled ground.
The sad, unvarying picture wrought
Upon the pitying woman’s heart
Of Alice, the Colonel’s wife, and taught
Her spirit to choose the better part,—
The labor of loving angels, sent
To men in their sore encompassment.
Daily her gentle steps were bent
Through the thin pathways which divide
The patient sufferers, side from side,
In dolorous wards, where Death and Life
Wage their silent, endless strife;
And she gave to all her soothing words,
Sweet as the songs of homestead birds.
Sometimes that utterance musical
On the soldier’s failing sense would fall
Seeming, almost, a prelude given
Of whispers that calm the air of Heaven;
While her white hand, moistening his poor lips
With the draught which slakeless fever sips,
Pointed him to that fount above,—
River of water of life and love,—
Stream without price, of whose purity
Whoever thirsteth may freely buy.
4. How many—whom in their mortal pain
She tended—’twas given her to gain,
Through Him who died upon the rood,
For that divine beatitude,
Who of us all can ever know
Till the golden books their records show?
But she saw their dying faces light,
And felt a rapture in the sight.
And many a sufferer’s earthly life
Thanked for new strength the Colonel’s wife;
Many a soldier turned his head,
Watching her pass his narrow bed,
Or, haply, his feeble frame would raise,
As the dim lamp her form revealed;
And, like the children in the field,
(For soldiers like little ones become,—
As simple in heart, as frolicsome,)
One and another breathed her name,
Blessing her as she went and came.
5. So, through all actions pure and good,
Unknowing evil, shame, or fear,
She grew to perfect ladyhood,—
Unwittingly the mate and peer
Of the proudest of her husband’s blood.
XI.
1. Like an affluent, royal town, the summer camps
Of a hundred thousand men are stretched away.
At night, like multitudinous city lamps,
Their numberless watch-fires beacon, clear and still,
And a glory beams from the zenith lit
With lurid vapors that over its star-lights flit;
But wreaths of opaline cloud o’erhang, by day,
The crystal-pointed tents, from hill to hill,
From vale to vale—until
The heavens on endless peaks their curtain lay.
A magical city! spread to-night
On hills which slope within our sight:
To-morrow, as at the waving of a wand,
Tents, guidons, bannerols are moved afar,—
Rising elsewhere, as rises a morning-star,
Or the dream of Aladdin’s palace in fairy-land.
2. Camp after camp, like marble square on square;
Street following street, with many a park between;
Bright bayonet-sparkles in the tremulous air;
Far-fading, purple smoke above their sheen;
Green central fields with flags like flowers abloom;
And, all about, close-ordered, populous life:
But here no festering trade, no civic strife,
Only the blue-clad soldiers everywhere,
Waiting to-morrow’s victory or doom,—
Men of the hour, to whom these pictures seem,
Like school-boy thoughts, half real, half a dream.
3. Camps of the cavalry, apart,
Are pitched with nicest art
On hilly suburbs where old forests grow.
Here, by itself, one glimmers through the pines,—
One whose high-hearted chief we know:
A thousand men leap when his bugles blow;
A thousand horses curvet at his lines,
Pawing the turf; among them come and go
The jacketed troopers, changed by wind and rain,
Storm, raid, and skirmish, sunshine, midnight dew,
To bronzéd men who never ride in vain.
4. In the great wall-tent at the head of the square,
The Colonel hangs his sword, and there
Huge logs burn high in front at the close of the day;
And the captains gather ere the long tattoo,
While the banded buglers play;
Then come the tales of home and the troopers’ song.
Clear over the distant outposts float the notes,
And the lone vidette to catch them listens long;
And the officer of the guard, upon his round,
Pauses, to hear the sound
Of the chiming chorus poured from a score of throats:
5. CAVALRY SONG.
Our good steeds snuff the evening air,
Our pulses with their purpose tingle;
The foeman’s fires are twinkling there;
He leaps to hear our sabres jingle!
HALT!
Each carbine send its whizzing ball:
Now, cling! clang! forward all,
Into the fight!
Dash on beneath the smoking dome,
Through level lightnings gallop nearer!
One look to Heaven! No thoughts of home:
The guidons that we bear are dearer.
CHARGE!
Cling! clang! forward all!
Heaven help those whose horses fall!
Cut left and right!
They flee before our fierce attack!
They fall, they spread in broken surges!
Now, comrades, bear our wounded back,
And leave the foeman to his dirges.
WHEEL!
The bugles sound the swift recall:
Cling! clang! backward all!
Home, and good night!
XII.
1. When April rains and the great spring-tide
Cover the lowlands far and wide,
And eastern winds blow somewhat harsh
Over the salt and mildewed marsh,
Then the grasses take deeper root,
Sucking, athirst and resolute;
And when the waters eddy away,
Flowing in trenches to Newark Bay,
The fibrous blades grow rank and tall,
And from their tops the reed-birds call.
Five miles in width the moor is spread;
Two broad rivers its borders thread;
The schooners which up their channels pass
Seem to be sailing in the grass,
Save as they rise with the moon-drawn sea,
Twice in the day, continuously.
2. Gray with an inward struggle grown,
The brooding lawyer, Hermann Van Ghelt,
Lived at the mansion-house, alone;
But a chilling cloud at his bosom felt,
Like the fog which crept, at morn and night,
Across the rivers in his sight,
And rising, left the moorland plain
Bare and spectral and cold again.
He saw the one tall hill, which stood
Huge with its quarry and gloaming wood,
And the creeping engines, as they hist
Through the dim reaches of the mist,—
Serpents, with ominous eyes aglow,
Thridding the grasses to and fro;
And he thought how each dark, receding train
Carried its freight of joy and pain,
On toil’s adventure and fortune’s quest,
To the troubled city of unrest;
And he knew that under the desolate pall
Of the bleak horizon, skirting all,
The burdened ocean heaved, and rolled
Its moaning surges manifold.
3. Often at evening, gazing through
The eastward windows on such a view,
Its sense enwrapt him as with a shroud;
Often at noon, in the city’s crowd,
He saw, as ’twere in a mystic glass,
Unbidden faces before him pass:
A soldier, with eyes unawed and mild
As the eyes of one who was his child;
A woman’s visage, like that which blest
A year of his better years the best;
And the plea of a voice, remembered well,
Deep in his secret hearing fell.
And as week by week its records brought
Of heroes fallen as they fought,
There little by little awakenéd
In the lawyer’s heart a shapeless dread,
A fear of the tidings which of all
On ear and spirit heaviest fall,—
Changeless sentence of mortal fate,
Freezing the marrow with—Too Late!
XIII.
1. Thus,—when ended the morning tramp,
And the regiment came back to camp,
And the Colonel, breathing hard with pain,
Was carried within the lines again,—
Thus a Color-Sergeant told
The story of that skirmish bold:
2. “’Twas an hour past midnight, twelve hours ago,—
We were all asleep, you know,
Save the officer on his rounds,
And the guard-relief,—when sounds
The signal-gun! once—twice—
Thrice! and then, in a trice,
The long assembly-call rang sharp and clear,
Till ‘Boots and Saddles’ made us scamper like mice.
No time to waste
In asking whether a fight was near;
Over the horses went their traps in haste;
Not ten minutes had past
Ere we stood in marching gear,
And the call of the roll was followed by orders fast:
‘Prepare to mount!’
‘Mount!’—and the company ranks were made;
Then in each rank, by fours, we took the count,
And the head of the column wheeled for the long parade.