A Beautiful Life [pp. 279-281]

THE LADIES REPOSITORY.
She was a woman, God made her so,
Gave her a woman's strength and weakness:
She was a wife, and her lifted brow
Wore the crown with a grave, sweet meekness:
She was a mother-you have seen trees
Blush and bloom in Summer sweetness,
And wxhen Autumn tracked brown the leas
Reach low their arms full of rare completeness.
She was not beautiful, as men say it,
And yet the angels would call her so:
She claimed nor won homage as men pay it Pray God keep all our paths green and low!But O! wahen she stood in the pale, gray gloaming,
Just upon evening's hither edge,
Listening the step that was late in coming,
Leaning out under night's slaty ledge,
Iher eyes, grown wide through gazing on heaven,
And broad green reaches of field and wood,
Luminous with light that is only given
By love's fruition-as thus she stood
I used to dream that a saint might lean so
From her safe, pure heaven, to xwelcome to rest
The love of her earth-life; for this woman, seen so,
Had caught the look that is worn by the blest.
And when beside the low, soft pillow,
All shimmered over with golden hair,
She knelt, as a sea-weed caught by a billow
I-leaves and swells with the full life there,
11er bosom swelling with mother tenderness,
While on her lips prayers and kisses lay warm,
With soft fingers stroking the dainty slenderness
Of dimpled limb and unconscious form,
O then she seemed like some pure and holy
Madonna mother! I thank God so,
That she most honored was still most lowly,
And still most woman, and mother too.
A woman's life is a wonderful thing
A yearning, hungering, questioning,
Outreaching toward the Infinite!
Wearing her womanhood like a crown, yet holding
Her pilgrim staff of duty. 0 proud man,
When in your tender clasp that soft hand folding,
Have you not cursed the staff that vexed your palm?
So of this woman of whom I write;
Her home was her temple, each homely duty
A sacred, and holy, and reverent rite,
All glorified by love's tender beauty,
My pilgrim staff had seemed hard and brown,
Hers budded greenly, and under and over
1ier hands the starry blossoms trailed down Mignonnette, rose-geranium, wheat, and clov er.
But all her life had the rare, fine smell
That lingers above the incense smoke,
And on her forehead there seemed to dwell
The grave, high calmness of those who look
With eyes washed pure of earthly mist,
Within the temple, and gaze, Christ-shriven,
Through blue, and scarlet, and amethyst,
Straight to the altar place of heaven.
As one who, climbing to Sinai's height,
Heard God speak plainly, and straightway knew
That altar, and sacrifice, and rite
Were only emblems that hid from view
His close, sweet presence revealed above
The mercy-seat and cherubim;
So she in these duties to human love
Heard him speak, and reverent, worshiped him.
And as a lily hid among low valleys
Puts up its pale green petals to the sky,
Gathering dews and sunshine in its chalice,
Feeding its frail life on them hungrily,
Until that life grown full, and pure, and rare,
Is but the embodied beauty of their essence;
A strange, sweet vision, born of sun and air,
Making the fair earth fairer for its presence;
So she, in the green vale of her content,
Filled all her life with earth's and heaven's best
graces,
And grew to be their rare embodiment.
As when a sculptor's patient chisel traces
A meaning on the pale, fair marble's brow,
And leaves it there forever; so with hand
That modeled God's idea still and low,
She wrought the meaning of the Master's plan,
Until her life stood pure as carved ideal,
A woman's life, strong, deep, and large, to embosom
The fullest meaning of the grandest real.
And life meant much to her, meant home, and love,
And children's prattle, and a faithful heart's
devotion;
Yet meant more, meant a height as far above
These joys as mountain peak above the plain's
green ocean;
A height so far and still, so awfully sublime,
That walking there touching God's altar horn,
She smiled down on this pitiful reach of time,
Measured it with that smile from bourn to bourn,
And knew how all the horror of its uttermost sweep
Of woe, its terriblest abysm of black despair,
Its pleasures which, like "poppies of eternal sleep,"
Are showered o'er lives that stifle for purer air,
Its loves, and joys, and triumphs, paled and fell
LIike dead, white ashes, on an altar place,
While she stood, calm in reverence, within the veil,
And gazed on the clear light that hid Jehovah's face.
And when my soul could comprehend it, my dull,
dumb despair,
Seemed like a loud, outspoken blasphemy,
That hurt with its fierce breath the quivering air,
And made the scared stars shiver in the sky,
Till, not to hear it, I caught up my broken life,
And went and laid it down before God's furnace-fire,
And cried out over it, "Lord, here ends all my strife!
Crush me! and heat thy burning crucible seven
times higher;
I shall not murmur! Only fit me so
For the embodying of thy grand ideal,
That I may work out in thy furnace glow
Of anguish, or upon bare heights, or where still
waters flowThou knowest where and how, it were not well for
me to know A life as grand, and pure, and holy as this real I"
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