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Via Solitaria.
An unpublished poem found among the private
papers of Henry W. Longfellow.
Alone I walked the peopled city,
Where each seemed happy with his own,
Oh! friends, I ask not for your pity,
I walk alone.
No more for me yon lake rejoices,
Though moved by loving airs of June,
Oh! birds, your sweet and piping voices
Are out of tune.
In vain for me the elm tree arches
Its plumes in many a feathery spray,
In vain the evening’s starry marches,
And sunlit day.
In vain your beauty, summer flowers,
Ye can not greet these cordial eyes,
They gaze on other fields than ours,
On other skies.
The gold is rifled from the coffer,
The blade is stolen from the sheath,
Life has but one more boon to offer,
And that is—Death.
Yet well I know the voice of duty,
And, therefore, life and health must crave.
Though she who gave the world its beauty
Is in her grave.
I live, lost one! for the living
Who drew their earliest life from thee,
And wait until with glad thanksgiving,
I shall be free.
For life to me is but a station
Wherein apart a traveler stands —
One absent long from home and nation.
In other lands.
And I, as he who stands and listens,
Amid the twilight’s chill and gloom,
To hear approaching in the distance,
The train for home.
For death shall bring another mating,
Beyond the shadows of the tomb,
On yonder shore a bride is waiting
Until I come.
In yonder field are children playing,
And there —oh! vision of delight—
I see the child and mother straying
In robes of white.
Thou, then the longing heart that breakest.
Stealing our treasures one by one,
I’ll call thee blessed when thou makest
The parted, one!
Track Through the Bible.
(Continued from Page 6.)
quarrel reveals the sad disintegration of the na
tion. The consciousness of its unity seems to have
been largely lost.
The seventh declension opens with the declara
tion, i lsrael again did that which was evil,” and
they were, again, delivered to discipline at the
hands of the Philistines, under whose oppression
they lived for forty years. Here occurs one of the
strongest stories of the Old Testament, that of
■Samson. It is the story of a great opportunity
and disastrous failure. Everything' would seem
to have been in his favor. His birth was foretold
by an angel visitor. This foretelling led to his
special training, and finally he was moved in the
early years by the Spirit of the Lord. Grown to
manhood’s estate, he went to Timnath, and there
was swept away by his passions into an unholy
alliance. The story of his exploits is most remar
kable. The circumstances of them are not to his
credit. The overruling hand of God is seen check
ing the power of the Philistines through him, but
through all his deterioration is manifest. His
The Golden Age for March 7, 1907.
final fall occurred at Gaza. There is nothing, per
haps, in the sacred writings at once more pathetic
and tragic than iSamson with his eyes put out,
grinding in the house of the Philistines. At last,
out of his degradation, he cried to God, and in
his death, struck the heaviest blow at the people
from whose oppression he ought to have delivered
his own people.
Here ends the history of our book. It is taken
up again in the first book of Samuel. The remain
ing chapters and the book of Ruth have their
chronological place in the period already dealt
with.
C. APPENDIX.
The events chronicled may have taken place
closely following the death of Joshua. They give
us a picture of the internal condition of the peo
ple, and it is most probable that they were aJ l^'1
with that as the intention of the historian. Micah’s
act was a violation of the second commandment.
His action was not that of adopting the idolatries
of the heathen. His mother’s language showed
her recognition of Jehovah: ‘‘Blessed be my s
of the Lord.” Moreover, Micah’s words, when he
persuaded the Levite to be his priest, showed the
same thing. “Now know I that the Lord will be
my God.” The images were intended to aid him
in his worship of Jehovah. The whole story is a
revelation of a degenerate condition. Micah had
robbed his mother. On making restitution he ac
companied the act, at her instigation, with this re
ligious movement. The consent of the Levite to
become a priest in the house of Micah for the
sake of a living, was a further revelation of the
same degeneracy.
The story of the backsliding of individuals is
followed by an illustration of its widespread exis
tence among the people. The Danites, in the
course of seeking new territory, found Micah and
the condition of things established in his house.
When presently they moved forward to possess,
they did not hesitate to seize his images and cap
ture his priest.
The story of the Levite follows, and is a clear
revelation of the startling moral conditions. Re
sulting from it, the nation was stirred to its een*o •
and a great moral passion flamed out. Israel went
to war with Benjamin. Uninstructed zeal will,
even in the cause of righteousness, often go be
yond its proper limits. The carnage continued
until not above six hundred men of the tribe of
Benjamin were left. Then followed a sudden re
vulsion, and pity operated to the saving of Ben
jamin.
Plea For Drunkards’ Wives.
The following touching account of the emotions
of a drunkard and his wife, and of the cloud that
must forever overshadow a home which drink has
once made desolate, appeared in the Georgian, and
is from the pen of John G. Woolley, who is devoting
his life and his brilliant energies to the question
of prohibition, and who, if a national prohibition
law is ever enacted, may be rightly considered as
one of its chief advocates and promoters:
“I shall never drink again, but one night in
a New England train, and very ill, I met a stran
ger who pitied me and gave me a quick, powei T” 1
drug out of a small vial and my pain was gone in
a minute or two, but alcohol was licking rp my
very blood with tongues of flame.
“I should have gotten drunk that ni>ht if I
co ild. I thought of everything—of my two years
of clean life; of the meetings I was going to, vouch
ed for by my friend and brother, I). L. Moody: of
the bright little home in New York; of Mary and
the boy’s; I tried to pray, and my lips framed
oaths.
“I reached up for God, and He was gone, and the
fiercest fiend of hell had me by the throat ami
shouted, ‘Drink, drink, drink!’ I said, ‘But Mary
—but the boys’; it said, ‘To hell with Mary—
come on to the saloon.’
“It was not yet daylight, (Sunday morning, when
I stood on the platform at Pawtucket, R. 1., alone.
I flew from saloon to saloon; they were shut up;
so were the drug stores, and all that day, locked
in my room at the hotel, I fought my fight and won
it in the evening by the grace of God; but the
people of Pawtucket never knew that the man who
spoke to them that night had been in hell all day.
“What would you take in cash to have that put
into your life?
“That is to be my portion until my dying day:
but, if merciful, patient time shall cauterize and
heal the old, dishonorable wounds and cover them
with repulsive but impervious cicatrices.
“Yet, because I had those wounds, I am to
be through my whole life considered a moral cliff
dweller, a creature of precipices, where one false
step ends all; and so denied full confidence of my
fellow-men, the highest grace of life to strive for
in this world; and I am told I have a Christian
enemy or two "who wait on tiptoe of expectancy
and cheerfully prophesy the sure near coming of
my final plunge back into the Dead Sea of Drink.
“Several years ago, at another time, after a
long lecture tour in the West, I telegraphed to my
wife in Boston: ‘I will arrive home tonight at 11.’
The train was late, and long after midnight I
came under her window. The light was burning,
and I knew that she was waiting for me, I let my
self in; there were two flights of stairs, but twen
ty would have been nothing to me, my heart was
hauling away like a great balloon.
“She stood in Hie middle of our room as pale
and cold and motionless as a woman of snow, and
I knew’ at a glance that the sweet, brave life was
in torture.
“ ‘What is it?’ I cried, ‘what is the matter?’ and
in mv arms she sobbed out the everlasting tragedy
of her wedded life. ‘Nothing—at any rate, noth
ing ought to be the matter. I do believe in you;
I knew you would come home; but I have listen
ed for you so many years, that I seem to be juist
one great ear when yon are away beyond your
time: I seem to have lost all sense but that of hear
ing when, you are absent, unexplained, and every
sound on the street startles me, and every sound
on the stairs is a threat and a pain, and the still
ness chokes me, and the darkness smothers me.
And all the old, unhappy home-comings troop
through my mind, without omitting one detail, and
tonight I heard the children sighing in their sleep,
and I thought I should die when I thought of you
having to walk in your weariness, and in this
midnight through Kneeland street alone.’
“She thinks that I will never fall; and would
deny today that she knows any fear, but yet, until
the undertaker screws her sweet face out of my
sight forever, that ghastly, unformed, nameless thing
will walk the chambers of her heart whenever I am
unaccounted for.
“You to whom has been given the unshaken and
unshakable confidence of her you love, I beseech to
make a fight for the women who wait tonight until
the saloon sends to them their husbands and their
sons maudlin, brutish, devilish.
“And you happy wives, whose hearts have never
wavered nor had occasion to waver, and who. when
your husbands fail to come on time, can go to bed
without fear and go to sleep the long night through
too peacefully even to dream, by the mercy of God,
that gives you that, I beseech you. band your
selves to help, at least to cheer, the wives who,
their whole lives through, must walk the rotten
lava-crust of burnt-out confidence —their very love
a terror and pain.”
•
A leading American politician recently took his
little son to Washington, where they paid a visit
to the Senate gallery. Dr. Edward Everett Hale
specially interested the boy, and his father ex
plained that Dr. Hale was the chaplain of the Sem
ate. “Oh, he prays for the Senate, doesn’t he?”
asked the lad. “No,” said the politician, “he
gets up and takes a look at the Senate and then
prays for the country, ” —Christian Life.
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