yields up his post when a woman assails him?
Alone and despairing thy brother remains
At the desolate shrine where we stood up together,
Half tempted to envy thy self-imposed chains,
And stoop his own neck for the noose of the tether!

"So firm and yet false! Thou mind'st me in sooth
Of St. Anthony's fall when the spirit of evil[14]

. . . . .

Filled the cell of his rest with imp, dragon and devil;
But the Saint never lifted his eyes from the Book
Till the tempter appeared in the guise of a woman;
And her voice was so sweet that he ventured one look,
And the devil rejoiced that the Saint had proved human!"

In 1874, Gail Hamilton's niece was married at her house in Hamilton,
and she sent a grotesque invitation to Whittier, asking him to come to
her wedding, and prescribing a ridiculous costume he might wear. As a
postscript she mentioned that it was her niece who was to be married.
Whittier sent this reply, pretending not to have noticed the
postscript, but finally waking up to the fact that she was not herself
to be the bride:--

AMESBURY, 12th mo. 29th, 1874.

GAIL HAMILTON'S WEDDING

"Come to my wedding," the missive runs,
"Come hither and list to the holy vows;
If you miss this chance you will wait full long
To see another at Gail-a House!"

_Her_ wedding! What can the woman expect?
Does she think her friends can be jolly and glad?
Is it only the child who sighs and grieves
For the loss of something he never had?

Yet I say to myself, Is it strange that she
Should choose the way that we know is good
What right have we to grumble and whine
In a pitiful dog-in-the-manger mood?

What boots it to maunder with "if" and "perhaps,"
And "it might have been" when we know it could n't,
If she had been willing (a vain surmise),
It 's ten to one that Barkis would n't.

'T was pleasant to think (if it _was_ a dream)
That our loving homage her need supplied,
Humbler and sadder, if wiser, we walk
To feel her life from our own lives glide.

Let her go, God bless her! I fling for luck
My old shoe after her. Stay, what 's this?
Is it all a mistake? The letter reads,
"My _niece_, you must know, is the happy miss."

All 's right! To grind out a song of cheer
I set to the crank my