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XXXIII

‘Each day I have come to tell him, and failed, with my hand on the
gate.
I bore the dreadful knowledge, and crushed my heart with its weight.
The letter brought by your comrade–he has but just read it aloud!
It only reached him this morning!’ Her head on his shoulder she
bowed.
Then Tom with pity’s tenderest lordliness patted her arm,
And eyed the old white-head fondly, with something of doubt and
alarm.

XXXIV

O, take to your fancy a sculptor whose fresh marble offspring
appears
Before him, shiningly perfect, the laurel-crown’d issue of years:
Is heaven offended? for lightning behold from its bosom escape,
And those are mocking fragments that made the harmonious shape!
He cannot love the ruins, till, feeling that ruins alone
Are left, he loves them threefold. So passed the old grandfather’s
moan.

XXXV

John’s text for a sermon on Slaughter he heard, and he did not
protest.
All rigid as April snowdrifts, he stood, hard and feeble; his chest
Just showing the swell of the fire as it melted him. Smiting a rib,
‘Heigh! what have we been about, Tom! Was this all a terrible fib?’
He cried, and the letter forth-trembled. Tom told what the cannon
had done.
Few present but ached to see falling those aged tears on his heart’s
son!

XXXVI

Up lanes of the quiet village, and where the mill-waters rush red
Thro’ browning summer meadows to catch the sun’s crimsoning head,
You meet an old man and a maiden who has the soft ways of a wife
With one whom they wheel, alternate; whose delicate flush of new
life
Is prized like the early primrose. Then shake his right hand, in
the chair –
The old man fails never to tell you: ‘You’ve got the French
General’s there!’