Now with white lips and broken moan Is heard along the gloomy street, Nearer and nearer yet they come, With clanking arms and noiseless drum. With brutal voice and oath profane, The startled boy for exile's chain. They leave the pavement. Flowers that spread Are crushed and broken. Crimson hands Rush in and savagely demand, The mother sprang with gesture wild, And to her bosom snatched the child'; Then with pale cheek and flashing eye, Shouted with fearful energy,"Back ruffians back! nor dare to tread Too near the body of my dead! Nor touch the living boy-I stand Between him and your lawless band! No traitor he-But listen! I' Have cursed your master's tyranny. I cheered my lord to join the band Of those who swore to free our land, Or fighting, die; and when he pressed Me for the last time to his breast, I knew that soon his form would be Low as it is, or Poland free. He went and grappled with the foe, Take me, and bind these arms, these hands, To perish, if 'twill save my child!" "Peace, woman, peace!" the leader cried, "One moment!" shrieked the mother, And, Russian, ask a boon of thee. one; Take palaces, take lands, take all, He stooped to seize the glittering store, But the brave child is roused at length, His curling lip and crimson cheeks "Ye hold me not! no, no, nor can; This hour has made the boy a man. I knelt beside my slaughted sire, To free myself this very hour. This dagger in my heart! and then, Where is your boasted power, base men?" He drew aside his broidered vest, And there, like slumbering serpent's crest, "Ha! start ye back? Fool! coward! knave! A moment, and the funeral light I only wait for thy embrace. OUR child was a girl; we called it May, from the month in which it was born. My child, my child! through the vista of long years, years of pain and trial, years of woe and weakness, years that have reft me of all my soul's idols, stripped my life of all that gave it a vestige of grace and sweetness, thy image stands forth crowned with light and purity, untouched by sin, surrounded with a halo of innocence, of peace. God loved thee, little one; God, who alone can bring good out of evil, filled the soul of the child with His own spirit, and made thee, while yet on earth, the child of Heaven. Unlike most men, my husband, from the time our child was born, idolized it with all a woman's tenderness. It was as often in his arms as in mine that it fell asleep. Sometimes, with a sort of, jealous love, he would take it out in the garden, away from every one, and there sit contemplating it, in an ecstasy of paternal pride and tenderness. Then, for the first time, he told me how he had long yearned for this boon, this treasure; how the sight of other children had excited in his breast a passionate longing to be similarly blessed. May, he thought, was like me; but she certainly had his smile; that smile that came dawning out of the depths of deep dreamy eyes, until it brightened over the whole face, and then slowly, tenderly, died away into the pensiveness that was its habitual expression. played or sung to her, enwrapped in silent delight at the sounds as soon as she could articulate anything approaching to words, she would indicate the names or the prominent syllables of her favorite songs, and soon join me in singing the airs; music was indeed her first language, for she sung before she could speak, and retained whole tunes before she could utter sentences. In the summer evenings, she would rove dreamily about the garden, as we sat watching her; now playing with a flower, now wistfully following the flight of a bird, now gazing up into the sky in long, rapt contemplation, slowly singing to herself some wild air that she had caught, we knew not how; sometimes adapting to it baby-words of her own, rhymeless, of course, and often disconnected, but frequently strangely full of poetic beauty, and in perfect metre with the melody. I have now some of these infant poems, written down as they flowed from her lips, which might perfectly pass for unrhymed translations from old German ballads, so sweet, so wild and mystic is the poetry contained in them. Except one family, she had no childish companions, nor did she care for the society of any others; she would sit by strange children, if by chance she came in contact with them, and kiss them, and willingly resign to them her toys; but she had no pleasure in their boisterous games, which fatigued and overpowered her, morally and physically. She was fairer than either of us, with a complexion of the most exquisite pearly transparency; features With the children of our neighbor, she took, or that, from the first, were chiselled with a delicacy of rather they accorded her, a singular position; she was finish rare indeed in infancy; and pale golden hair, light to them a sort of little sibyl, a superior being, to whom and floating. Her form was no less perfect than they willingly and lovingly did intellectual homage. her features: cast in the most faultless mould, each | With her, their games were always of a scenic and piclimb was a study for a sculptor, each movement replete with a strange and nameless grace, and to her, indeed, might apply the exclamation of the Roman conqueror, Non Angli sed Angeli! for she looked as if her birthplace must be in some heavenly, no earthly land. From the first, she had little in common with other children: "A moody child, and wildly wise," she seemed to reflect and wonder gravely over the puzzle of existence, before she could speak or run alone; she hardly ever cried, and never appeared restless or suffering. Often, in the dead of night, listening, and failing to hear her light breathing, I have stolen to her cot, and there she lay, wide awake, her large violet eyes fixed dreamily on some object in the room, her tiny hands playing with the coverlet; then, when she saw me, that strange, divine smile would come over her face; she would stretch up her dimpled arms, and as I stooped, clasp them round my neck and hold me there, her cheek against mine, but ready to release me at a word, without struggle or resistance. From her earliest infancy, the child displayed a love and aptitude for music I have never seen equalled. A baby, she would sit for hours on my knee while I turesque character; they were kings, and queens, and fairies-she ever bearing the sceptre, with mild and tender sway. They would listen to her songs, and when she got a little older, to the wild, fantastic tales she would improvise for their amusement, with an earnest attention they would hardly bestow on far more experienced romancers. The personages of these histories sometimes gained so strongly on the interest and affections of the audience, that they acquired at last a personality and a reality that was strange and striking, and they were carried on from tale to tale, and made afresh the heroes and heroines of new romances, till at last, from being merely characters introduced into the story, they acquired the position of real individuals, round whom the events and circumstances formed themselves; of whose lives the narrative was the veritable chronicle, and whose acts and thoughts, sayings and doings, were full of familiar interest. One day our neighbor said to his son Edward, "Where is your little wife?" The child looked up gravely into his father's face, and replied, "Papa, May is not my wife, she is my angel!" Time passed on with little break or change, till May was five years old. Her ethereal beauty, her rare intelligence, her extraordinary sweetness of disposition, had developed themselves with every stage of her existence; and her musical genius, so early displayed, became so remarkable, that, while gently directing it, we dared not venture to cultivate its full extent, so engrossing did her taste for the art threaten to become. Other things she learned with the facility her fine intellect and extreme docility gave her in all studies; but this and poetry were the two that really delighted her, and to which she ever turned with constant and unwearying affection. Everything that lent itself as a theme to these, her darling arts, she cherished; nature and all its fair and poetic children, were to her subjects of tender interest and contemplation; the song of a bird, the colors of a butterfly, the starry sky-above all, flowers -flowers whose hues and perfumes awakened in her a sort of ecstasy, were to her ceaseless sources of wondering, admiring love. But she stopped not at the finite a strange, deep instinct of the infinite seemed to have been born with her. She could never be taught a set prayer; her life was one constant aspiration. All that was fine and high and noble came to her naturally, and untaught; everything mean and false and unworthy, she failed to take in or comprehend; it passed by without touching her, kept from her contact by an atmosphere of immaculate purity. She could rarely be considered gay—never sad; but always more or less absorbed in a dreamy, tender reflectiveness. Sometimes, to rouse her from a reverie, I have asked her some trifling question; she would draw a deep sigh, look up with large absent eyes, and gaze silently, halfunconsciously, on my face; then gradually the wandering thoughts came back from far-off fairy lands: "The strange, slow smile she had," broke over her countenance, lightening up "Dark violet eyes, whose glances, deep with April tints of sunny tears, 'Neath long soft lashes laid asleep, seem'd all too thoughtful for her years; gers she saw, she never lost the quiet self-possession of her manner; she would talk, and, if asked, sing to them as easily and as naturally as to us, wholly unconscious alike of diffidence or display. Nothing alarmed her; she always reminded me of Una with the lion-ever fearless and unsuspicious of the dangerous qualities of anything she met, though strongly alive to sympathetic and antipathetic influences, clinging to the former and shunning the latter, not from fear, but from distaste. The reading of the Bible had always a peculiar charm for her. Certain chapters she would dwell and reflect over with rapt attention; but the xv. of 1 Corinthians, on the Resurrection, was, of all, her favorite. Instead of viewing the idea of death with the trembling awe it excites in ordinary children, she regarded it merely as a passage from the present to a future state of inexpressible felicity; not a vague, distant, intangible felicity, beyond the limits of human thought and human speculation, but a condition near, almost within reach, the nature of whose joys, formed the frequent theme of her reflections and conjectures. One of our servants lost her sister, and May saw her weeping. When the cause of her grief was explained, the child was evidently at a loss; the sight of tears on such an occasion agreed not with her theory, and she reflected long and deeply over the question. Mamma, why does Kate cry because her sister is dead? she ought to be glad that she is happy.' "Yes; but she is sorry that she is gone from her; that she will never see her any more till she dies herself. You say your heart is hungry when papa goes away for long; think how it would starve if he never came back any more." "Or you, petite mère! Oh, don't go away-don't die without me! take me with you; or let me die first, and then the angels will help me to have such a lovely place ready for you when you come to me!—promise, maman chérie, that you won't die first, nor let papa!" And she clung round me with kisses and earnest As tho' from mine her eyes had caught the secret of some mournful entreating caresses, that it wrung my heart to receive. thought;" her soft lips opened, and, as she replied, she stole to my side, winding her arms round me, and resting her bright cheek on my shoulder. Never shall I forget her face when her father returned after an absence of even a few hours. Her joy was not boisterous or loudly demonstrative, but her eyes lighted up: she came to him with her radiant face, and outstretched arms, and, when he lifted her in his, she covered cheeks, eyelids, brow, and lips, with kisses; then, fearing lest I should be jealous, stretched out an arm to me, drawing my head towards her till our three faces met together. Curious to see if the child could in any way analyze her feelings, I one day said to her: "May, why do you love papa?" She looked up, pausing for a moment. A strange, wild, superhuman thought like lightning crossed my brain-half a fear-that it might be as she said. It was May's sixth birthday: I had given her a new and splendidly bound Bible for the occasion, and her father a beautiful pony. In a lovely and peculiarly retired part of the forest, near our cottage, we had, unknown to her, arranged to dine. Everything was sent on and set in order beforehand, so that when we should arrive, the surprise might be complete; and in the afternoon we sallied forth, she mounted on her pony, and her father and I walking by her side. Lovely as she was, her beauty, I thought, seemed that day more ethereal, more angelic than I had ever before seen it. She was dressed all in white: her com plexion, as we moved along through the dim cool shade of the forest, appeared to assume a transparency new even to it; her rosy lips were slightly parted, display ing the pearls beneath; her large, deep, black-lashed, violet eyes, were slightly raised, and fixed in profound She was not the least shy: with the very few stran- contemplation; while the glory of her golden curls "I don't know why; but when he's away long, my heart feels hungry; and then when he comes, he seems to feed it with so much love!" |