The Professor at the Breakfast-Table eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 365 pages of information about The Professor at the Breakfast-Table.

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 365 pages of information about The Professor at the Breakfast-Table.

I found these stanzas in the young girl’s book among many others.  I give them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.

Under the violets.

     Her hands are cold; her face is white;
     No more her pulses come and go;
     Her eyes are shut to life and light;
     Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
     And lay her where the violets blow.

     But not beneath a graven stone,
     To plead for tears with alien eyes;
     A slender cross of wood alone
     Shall say, that here a maiden lies
     In peace beneath the peaceful skies.

     And gray old trees of hugest limb
     Shall wheel their circling shadows round
     To make the scorching sunlight dim
     That drinks the greenness from the ground,
     And drop their dead leaves on her mound.

     When o’er their boughs the squirrels run,
     And through their leaves the robins call,
     And, ripening in the autumn sun,
     The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
     Doubt not that she will heed them all.

     For her the morning choir shall sing
     Its matins from the branches high,
     And every minstrel voice of spring,
     That trills beneath the April sky,
     Shall greet her with its earliest cry.

     When, turning round their dial-track,
     Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
     Her little mourners, clad in black,
     The crickets, sliding through the grass,
     Shall pipe for her an evening mass.

     At last the rootlets of the trees
     Shall find the prison where she lies,
     And bear the buried dust they seize
     In leaves and blossoms to the skies. 
     So may the soul that warmed it rise!

     If any, born of kindlier blood,
     Should ask, What maiden lies below? 
     Say only this:  A tender bud,
     That tried to blossom in the snow,
     Lies withered where the violets blow.

XI

You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour’s reading, what has been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months.  I cannot tell, of course, whether you are a nervous person or not.  If, however, you are such a person,—­if it is late at night,—­if all the rest of the household have gone off to bed,—­if the wind is shaking your windows as if a human hand were rattling the sashes,—­if your candle or lamp is low and will soon burn out,—­let me advise you to take up some good quiet sleepy volume, or attack the “Critical Notices” of the last Quarterly and leave this to be read by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and people near by who would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came down in a lump on the floor.

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The Professor at the Breakfast-Table from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.