But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
VI
You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
Bloated some, I expect.
This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which the
Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to
continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly
unpleasant world. This is so much a matter of course, that I was
surprised to see the divinity-student change color. He took a look at a
small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the
chapped sideboard. The image it returned to him had the color of a very
young pea somewhat overboiled. The scenery of a long tragic drama
flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a
station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on,
sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and
lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and
thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor,
who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving
themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, which throws off
your particular grief as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers;
undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who
plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter,
who puts your name on the slab which has been waiting for you ever since
the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the
grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the
mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but
you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness
without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright
column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size, so far as it
could be said to have any size at all, wandering about and living a thin
and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come
down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor
conveniences for taking the sitting posture.
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