t on thee!"
Thenceforth she knows how greatness blends with weakness;
Reverence, thenceforth, with pity linked, reveals
To her the pathos of the life of man,
A thing divine, and yet at every pore
Bleeding from crowned brows. A heart thus large
Hath room for many sorrows. What of that?
Its sorrow is its dowry's noblest part.
She bears it not alone. Such griefs, so shared--
Sickness, and fear, and vigils lone and long,
Waken her heart to love sublimer far
Than ecstasies of youth could comprehend;
Lift her perchance to heights serene as those
The Ascetic treadeth.'
'I would be that wife!'
Thus cried the second of those maidens three:
Yet who that gazed upon her could have guessed
Creature so soft could bear a heart so brave?
She seemed that goodness which was beauteous too;
Virtue at once, and Virtue's bright reward;
Delight that lifts, not lowers us; made for heaven;--
Made too to change to heaven some brave man's hearth.
She added thus: 'Of lives that women lead
Tell us the third!'
Gently the Saint replied:
'The third is Widowhood--a wintry sound;
And yet, for her who widow is indeed,
That winter something keeps of autumn's gold,
Something regains of Spring's first flower snow-white,
Snow-cold, and colder for its rim of green.
She feels no more the warmly-greeting hand;
The eyes she brightened rest on her no more;
Her full-orbed being now is cleft in twain:
Her past is dead: daily from memory's self
Dear things depart; yet still she is a wife,
A wife the more because of bridal bonds
Lives but their essence, waiting wings in heaven;--
More wife; and yet, in that great loneliness,
More maiden too than when first maidenhood
Lacked what it missed not. Like that other maid
She too a lonely Priestess serves her God;
Yea, though her chapel be a funeral vault,
Its altar black like Death;--the flowers thereon,
Tinct with the Blood Divine. Above that vault
She hears the anthems of the Spouse of Christ,
Widowed, like her, though Bride.'
'O fair, O sweet,
O beauteous lives all three; fair lot of women!'
Thus cried again the youngest of those Three,
Too young to know the touch of grief--or cause it--
A plant too lightly leaved to cast a shade.