aws near;
Then let us look up in the light and the glory,
And welcome this royal New Year.

The Courtship of George
Washington

The quaint old steel engraving which shows George and Martha
Washington sitting by a table, while the Custis children stand
dutifully by, is a familiar picture in many households, yet few of us
remember that the first Lady of the White House was not always first
in the heart of her husband.

The years have brought us, as a people, a growing reverence for him
who was in truth the "Father of His Country." Time has invested him
with godlike attributes, yet, none the less, he was a man among men,
and the hot blood of youth ran tumultuously in his veins.

At the age of fifteen, like many another schoolboy, Washington
fell in love. The man who was destined to be the Commander of the
Revolutionary Army, wandered through the shady groves of Mount Vernon
composing verses which, from a critical standpoint, were very bad.
Scraps of verse were later mingled with notes of surveys, and
interspersed with the accounts which that methodical statesman kept
from his school-days until the year of his death.

In the archives of the Capitol on a yellowed page, in Washington's own
handwriting, these lines are still to be read:

"Oh, Ye Gods, why should my Poor Resistless Heart
Stand to oppose thy might and Power,
At last surrender to Cupid's feather'd Dart,
And now lays bleeding every Hour
For her that's Pityless of my grief and Woes,
And will not on me, pity take.
I'll sleep amongst my most inveterate Foes,
And with gladness never wish to wake.
In deluding sleepings let my Eyelids close,
That in an enraptured Dream I may
In a soft lulling sleep and gentle repose
Possess those joys denied by Day."

Among these boyish fragments there is also an incomplete acrostic,
evidently intended for Miss Frances Alexander, which reads as follows:

"From your bright sparkling Eyes I was undone;
Rays, you have, rays more transparent than the Sun
Amidst its glory in the rising Day;
None can you equal in your bright array;
Constant in your calm, unspotted Mind;
Equal to all, but will to none Prove kind,
So knowing, seldom one so young you'll Find.

"Ah, woe's me that I should Love and conceal--
Long have I wished, but never dare reveal,
Even though severely Love's Pains I fe