I.
To one who found us on a starless night,
All helpless, groping in a dangerous way,
Where countless treacherous hidden pitfalls lay,
And, seeing all our peril, flashed a light
To show to our bewildered, blinded sight,
By one swift, clear, and piercing ray,
The safe, sure path,--what words could reach the height
Of our great thankfulness? And yet, at most,
The most he saved was this poor, paltry life
Of flesh, which is so little worth its cost,
Which eager sows, but may not stay to reap,
And so soon breathless with the strain and strife,
Its work half-done, exhausted, falls asleep.II.
But unto him who finds men's souls astray
In night that they know not is night at all,
Walking, with reckless feet, where they may fall
Each moment into deadlier deaths than slay
The flesh,--to him whose truth can rend away
From such lost souls their moral night's black pall,--
Oh, unto him what words can hearts recall
Which their deep gratitude finds fit to say?
No words but these,--and these to him are best:--
That, henceforth, like a quenchless vestal flame,
His words of truth shall burn on Truth's pure shrine;
His memory be truth worshipped and confessed;
Our gratitude and love, the priestess line,
Who serve before Truth's altar, in his name.
It was late in the afternoon of a November day. The sky had worn all daythat pale leaden gray color, which is depressing even to the leastsensitive of souls. Now, at sunset, a dull red tint was slowly stealingover the west; but the gray cloud was too thick for the sun to pierce, andthe struggle of the crimson color with the unyielding sky only made theheavens look more stern and pitiless than before.
Stephen White stood with his arms folded, leaning on the gate which shutoff, but seemed in no wise to separate, the front yard of the house inwhich he lived from the public highway. There is something always patheticin the attempt to enforce the idea of seclusion and privacy, by building afence around houses only ten or twelve feet away from the public road, andonly forty or fifty feet from each other. Rows of picketed palings andgates with latches and locks seem superfluous, when the passer-by canlook, if he likes, into the very centre of your sitting-room, and yourneighbors on the right hand and on the left can overhear every word yousay on a summer night, where windows are open.
One cannot walk through the streets of a New England village, withoutbeing impressed by a sense of this futile semblance of barrier, thistouching effort at withdrawal and reticence. Often we see the tacitrecognition of its uselessness in an old gate shoved back to its farthest,and left standing so till the very grass roots have embanked themselves oneach side of it, and it can never again be closed without digging away thesods in which it is wedged. The gate on which Stephen White was leaninghad stood open in that way for years before Stephen rented the house; hadstood open, in fact, ever since old Billy Jacobs, the owner of the house,had been carried out of it dead, in a coffin so wide that at first thebearers had thought it could not pass through the gate; but by huddlingclose, three at the head and three at the feet, they managed to tug theheavy old man through without taking down the palings. This was so longago that now there was nobody left who remembered Billy Jacobs distinctly,except his widow, who lived in a poor little house on the outskirts of thetown, her only income being that derived from the renting of the largehouse, in which she had once lived in comf