the sunset gates unbar,

Shall I not see thee waiting stand,

And, white against the evening star,

The welcome of thy beckoning hand?

Brisk wielder of the birch and rule,

The master of the district school

Held at the fire his favored place;

Its warm glow lit a laughing face

Fresh-hued and fair, where scarce appeared

The uncertain prophecy of beard.

He teased the mitten-blinded cat,

Played cross-pins on my uncle’s hat,

Sang songs, and told us what befalls

In classic Dartmouth’s college halls.

Born the wild Northern hills among,

From whence his yeoman father wrung

By patient toil subsistence scant,

Not competence and yet not want,

He early gained the power to pay

His cheerful, self-reliant way;

Could doff at ease his scholar’s gown

To peddle wares from town to town;

Or through the long vacation’s reach

In lonely lowland districts teach,

Where all the droll experience found

At stranger hearths in boarding round,

The moonlit skater’s keen delight,

The sleigh-drive through the frosty night,

The rustic party, with its rough

Accompaniment of blind-man’s-buff,

And whirling plate, and forfeits paid,

His winter task a pastime made.

Happy the snow-locked homes wherein

He tuned his merry violin,

Or played the athlete in the barn,

Or held the good dame’s winding yarn,

Or mirth-provoking versions told

Of classic legends rare and old,

Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome

Had all the commonplace of home,

And little seemed at best the odds

’Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods;

Where Pindus-born Araxes took

The guise of any grist-mill brook,

And dread Olympus at his will

Became a huckleberry hill.

A careless boy that night he seemed;

But at his desk he had the look

And air of one who wisely schemed,

And hostage from the future took

In trainéd thought and lore of book.

Large-brained, clear-eyed,—of such as he

Shall Freedom’s young apostles be,

Who, following in War’s bloody trail,

Shall every lingering wrong assail;

All chains from limb and spirit strike,

Uplift the black and white alike;

Scatter before their swift advance

The darkness and the ignorance,

The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth,

Which nurtured Treason’s monstrous growth,

Made murder pastime, and the hell

Of prison-torture possible;

The cruel lie of caste refute,

Old forms remould, and substitute

For Slavery’s lash the freeman’s will,

For blind routine, wise-handed skill;

A school-house plant on every hill,

Stretching in radiate nerve-lines thence

The quick wires of intelligence;

Till North and South together brought

Shall own the same electric thought,

In peace a common flag salute,

And, side by side in labor’s free

And unresentful rivalry,

Harvest the fields wherein they fought.

Another guest that winter night

Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light.

Unmarked by time, and yet not young,

The honeyed music of her tongue

And words of meekness scarcely told

A nature passionate and bold,

Strong, self-concentred, spurning guide,

Its milder features dwarfed beside

Her unbent will’s majestic pride.

She sat among us, at the best,

A not unfeared, half-welcome guest,

Rebuking with her cultured phrase

Our homeliness of words and ways.

A certain pard-like, treacherous grace

Swayed the lithe limbs and drooped the lash,

Lent the white teeth their dazzling flash;

And under low brows, black with night,

Rayed out at times a dangerous light;

The sharp heat-lightnings of her face

Presaging ill to him whom Fate

Condemned to share her love or hate.

A woman tropical, intense

In thought and act, in soul and sense,

She blended in a like degree

The vixen and the devotee,

Revealing with each freak or feint

The temper of Petruchio’s Kate,

The raptures of Siena’s saint.

Her tapering hand and rounded wrist

Had facile power to form a fist;

The warm, dark languish of her eyes

Was never safe from wrath’s surprise.

Brows saintly calm and lips devout

Knew every change of scowl and pout;

And the sweet voice had notes more high

And shrill for social battle-cry.

Since then what old cathedral town

Has missed her pilgrim staff and gown,

What convent-gate has held its lock

Against the challenge of her knock!

Through Smyrna’s plague-hushed thoroughfares,

Up sea-set Malta’s rocky stairs,

Gray olive slopes of hills that hem

Thy tombs and shrines, Jerusalem,

Or startling on her desert throne

The crazy Queen of Lebanon

With claims fantastic as her own,

Her tireless feet have held their way;

And still, unrestful, bowed, and gray,

She watches under Eastern skies,

With hope each day renewed and fresh,

The Lord’s quick coming in the flesh,

Whereof she dreams and prophesies!

Where’er her troubled path may be,

The Lord’s sweet pity with her go!

The outward wayward life we see,

The hidden springs we may not know.

Nor is it given us to discern

What threads the fatal sisters spun,

Through what ancestral years has run

The sorrow with the woman born,

What forged her cruel chain of moods,

What set her feet in solitudes,

And held the love within her mute,