II-2 The race, in conquering, Some fierce Titanic joy of conquest knows : Whether in veins of serf or king, 85 90 Our ancient blood beats restless in repose. The power of minds that know, Guarded by fire and steel, 95 100 Doff thine aeonian crown! One hour forget The glory, and recall the debt: Of humbler mood, For the pride of thine exultation O'er peril conquered and strife subdued! But half the right is wrested When victory yields her prize. And half the marrow tested When old endurance dies. In the sight of them that love thee, He faileth not to smite The idle ownership of Right, 145 Nor spares to sinews fresh from trial, And virtue schooled in long denial, The tests that wait for thee In larger perils of prosperity. 150 155 160 Shall plant, on thy fields apart, With the oak of Toil, the rose of Art! Be watchful, and keep us so: Be strong, and fear no foe: Be just, and the world shall know! With the same love love us, as we give; And the day shall never come, That finds us weak or dumb To join and smite and cry In the great task, for thee to die, And the greater task, for thee to live! New York Daily Tribune, July 5, 1876. 290 (1876) 295 300 ROSE TERRY COOKE (1827-1892) In the department of the short story the most interesting transition figure is Rose Terry Cooke, a native of Connecticut, a school teacher, and during her earlier literary period a poet of more than local fame. In her earlier stories she was completely of the mid century, sentimental, moralizing, sprawly in technique. But early in her work there appeared a note of independence. She would abandon the florid and the romantic and write of simple commonplace people in their homely environment. For the early volumes of the Atlantic she was the leading short story writer, and as one reads her stories in their order one finds a growing power, a growing sense of realistic values, until in a story like her Too Late' she is near to the grim realism of Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman at the end of the century. TOO LATE 1 5 In one of those scanty New England towns that fill a stranger with the acutest sense of desolation, more desolate than the desert itself, because there are human inhabitants to suffer from its solitude and listlessness, there stood, and still stands, a large red farm-house, with sloping roof, and great chimney in the middle, where to David Blair lived. Perhaps Wingfield was not so forlorn to him as to another, for he had Scotch blood in his veins, and his shrewd thrift found full exercise in redeeming the earth from thorns and 15 briars, and eating his bread under the full force of the primeval curse. He was a 'dour' man, with a long, grim visage that would have become any Covenanter's conventicle in his native land; and his 20 prayers were as long and grim as his face. Of life's graces and amenities he had no idea; they would have been scouted as profane vanities had they blossomed inside his threshold. Existence to him was 25 a heavy and dreadful responsibility; a drear and doubtful working out of his own salvation; a perpetual fleeing from the wrath to come, that seemed to dog his heels and rear threatening heads at every 30 turn. A cowardly man, with these everpresent terrors, would have taken refuge in some sweet and lulling sin or creed, some belief of a universal salvation, some epicurean let us eat and drink, for to- 35 morrow we die,' or some idea of nothing beyond the grave. 1 Copyright by Houghton Mifflin & Co. But David Blair was full of courage. Like some knotty, twisted oak, that offers scant solace to the eye, he endured, oaklike, all storms, and bent not an atom to any fierce blast of nature or Providence; for he made a distinction between them. His wife was a neat, quiet, subdued woman, who held her house and her husband in as much reverence as a Feejee holds his idols. Like most women, she had an instinctive love for grace and beauty, but from long repression it was only a blind and groping instinct. Her house was kept in a state of spotless purity, but was bald as any vineless rock within. Flies never intruded there; spiders still less. The windows of the 'best room' were veiled and double veiled with green paper shades and snow-white cotton curtains, and the ghastly light that strayed in through these obstructions revealed a speckless but hideous home-spun carpet, four straight-backed chairs, with horsehair seats, an equally black and shining sofa, and a round mahogany table with a great Bible in the midst. No vases, no shells, no ornament of useless fashion stood on the white wooden mantelpiece over the open fireplace; no stencil border broke the monotonous whitewash of the walls. You could see your face in a state of distortion and jaundice anywhere in the andirons, so brilliant were their brassy columns; and the very bricks of the chimney were scraped and washed from the soot of the rare fire. You could hardly imagine that even the leaping, wood fire could impart any cheer to the funereal 5 order of that chill and musty apartment. than life offered to her only moved her Bedroom, kitchen, shed, woodhouse - all child to an unavowed contempt for a soul shared this scrupulous array. The procso weak and so childish. În a certain esses that in other households are wont way Hannah Blair loved her mother, but to give tokens of cheery life, and bounty, it was more as if she had been her child and natural appetites and passions, seemed than her parent. Toward her father her here to be carried on under protest. No feelings were far different. She reflour was spilled when Thankful Blair spected him; he was her model. She made bread; no milk ever slopped from alone knew, from a like experience, what an overfull pail; no shoe ever brought in 10 reserved depth of feeling lay unawakmud or sand across the mats that lay in- ened under his rigid exterior - she knew, side and outside of every door. The very for there were times when her own garret preserved an aspect of serenity, granite nature shuddered through and since all its bundles of herbs hung evenly through with volcanic forces, when her side by side, and the stores of nuts had 15 only refuge against generous indignation each their separate boundaries, lest some or mighty anger was in solitary prayer or jarring door or intrusive mouse should grievous wrestlings of the flesh against scatter them. the spirit as well as the spirit against the flesh. So Hannah grew up to womanhood. Tall and slight as any woodland sapling, but without the native grace of a free growth, her erect and alert figure pleased only by its alacrity and spotless clothing. She was dredful spry,' as old Moll Thunder, the half-breed Indian woman used to say-dredful spry; most like squaw so still, so straight; blue eyes, most like ice. Ho! Moll better walk a chalk 'fore Miss Hanner!' In the midst of all this order there was yet a child, if little Hannah Blair_ever 20 was a child in more than name. From her babyhood she was the model of all Wingfield babies; a child that never fretted, that slept nights through all the pangs and perils of teething, that had 25 every childish disease with perfect decency and patience, was a child to be held up to every mother's admiration. Poor little soul! the mother love that crushed those other babies with kisses, that romped and 30 laughed with them, when she was left straight and solemn in her cradle, that petted, and slapped, and spoiled, and scolded all those common children, Thankful Blair kept under lock and key in her 35 inmost heart. 'Beware of idols!' was the stern warning that had fallen on her first outburst of joy at the birth of one living child at last, and from that time the whole tenor 40 of her husband's speech and prayer had been that they both might be saved from the awful sin of idolatry, and be enabled to bring up their child in the fear of the Lord, a hater of sin and a follower of 45 the Law: the gospel that a baby brought to light was not yet theirs! So Hannah grew to girlhood, a feminine reproduction of her father. Keen, practical insight is not the most softening trait for 50 a woman to possess. It is iron and steel in the soul that does not burn with love mighty and overflowing enough to fuse all other elements in its own glow, and as Hannah grew older and read her moth- 55 er's repressed nature through and through, the tender heart, the timid conscience, the longing after better and brighter things - And Moll spoke from bitter experience, for old Deacon Campbell himself never gave her severer lectures on her ungodly life and conversation than dropped with cutting distinctness from those prim, thin, red lips. Yet Hannah Blair was not without charms for the youth of Wingfield. Spare as she was, her face had the fresh bloom of youth upon its high, straight features; her eyes were blue and bright, her hair, smoothed about her small head, glittered like fresh flax, and made a heavy coil, that her slender white throat seemed over small to sustain. She was cool, serene, rather unapproachable to lovers or love makers, but she was David Blair's only child, and his farm lay fair and wide on the high plains of Wingfield. She was well-to-do and pious - charms which hold to this day potent sway over the youth of her native soil and after she was eighteen no Saturday night passed in solitude in the Blair keeping-room, for young men of all sorts and sizes ranged themselves against the wall, sometimes four at once, tilted their chairs, twirled their thumbs, crossed one foot and then the other over their alternate knees, dropped sparse remarks about the corn, or the |