Bitter-Sweet

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bitter-Sweet, by J. G. Holland
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Title: Bitter-Sweet
Author: J. G. Holland
Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6442]?[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]?[This file was first posted on December 14, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
? START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BITTER-SWEET ***
Produced by D. Garcia, Tom Allen, Charles Franks?and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
BITTER-SWEET
A Poem
By J. G. HOLLAND
CONTENTS.

PICTURE
PERSONS
PRELUDE
FIRST MOVEMENT--COLLOQUIAL.
The Question Stated and Argued
FIRST EPISODE.
The Question Illustrated by Nature
SECOND MOVEMENT--NARRATIVE.
The Question Illustrated by Experience
SECOND EPISODE.
The Question Illustrated by Story
THIRD MOVEMENT--DRAMATIC.
The Question Illustrated by the Denouement
L'ENVOY
PICTURE.
Winter's wild birthnight! In the fretful East?The uneasy wind moans with its sense of cold,?And sends its sighs through gloomy mountain gorge,?Along the valley, up the whitening hill,?To tease the sighing spirits of the pines,?And waste in dismal woods their chilly life.?The sky is dark, and on the huddled leaves--?The restless, rustling leaves--sifts down its sleet,?Till the sharp crystals pin them to the earth,?And they grow still beneath the rising storm.?The roofless bullock hugs the sheltering stack,?With cringing head and closely gathered feet,?And waits with dumb endurance for the morn.?Deep in a gusty cavern of the barn?The witless calf stands blatant at his chain;?While the brute mother, pent within her stall,?With the wild stress of instinct goes distraught,?And frets her horns, and bellows through the night.?The stream runs black; and the far waterfall?That sang so sweetly through the summer eyes,?And swelled and swayed to Zephyr's softest breath,?Leaps with a sullen roar the dark abyss,?And howls its hoarse responses to the wind.?The mill is still. The distant factory,?That swarmed yestreen with many-fingered life,?And bridged the river with a hundred bars?Of molten light, is dark, and lifts its bulk,?With dim, uncertain angles, to the sky.

Yet lower bows the storm. The leafless trees?Lash their lithe limbs, and, with majestic voice,?Call to each other through the deepening gloom;?And slender trunks that lean on burly boughs?Shriek with the sharp abrasion; and the oak,?Mellowed in fiber by unnumbered frosts,?Yields to the shoulder of the Titan Blast,?Forsakes its poise, and, with a booming crash,?Sweeps a fierce passage to the smothered rocks,?And lies a shattered ruin.

Other scene:--?Across the swale, half up the pine-capped hill,?Stands the old farmhouse with its clump of barns--?The old red farmhouse--dim and dun to-night,?Save where the ruddy firelights from the hearth?Flap their bright wings against the window panes,--?A billowy swarm that beat their slender bars,?Or seek the night to leave their track of flame?Upon the sleet, or sit, with shifting feet?And restless plumes, among the poplar boughs--?The spectral poplars, standing at the gate.
And now a man, erect, and tall, and strong,?Whose thin white hair, and cheeks of furrowed bronze,?And ancient dress, betray the patriarch,?Stands at the window, listening to the storm;?And as the fire leaps with a wilder flame--?Moved by the wind--it wraps and glorifies?His stalwart frame, until it flares and glows?Like the old prophets, in transfigured guise,?That shape the sunset for cathedral aisles.?And now it passes, and a sweeter shape?Stands in its place. O blest maternity!?Hushed on her bosom, in a light embrace,?Her baby sleeps, wrapped in its long white robe;?And as the flame, with soft, auroral sweeps,?Illuminates the pair, how like they seem,?O Virgin Mother! to thyself and thine!?Now Samuel comes with curls of burning gold?To hearken to the voice of God without:?"Speak, mighty One! Thy little servant hears!"?And Miriam, maiden, from her household cares?Comes to the window in her loosened robe,--?Comes with the blazing timbrels in her hand,--?And, as the noise of winds and waters swells,?It shapes the song of triumph to her lips:?"The horse and he who rode are overthrown!"?And now a man of noble port and brow,?And aspect of benignant majesty,?Assumes the vacant niche, while either side?Press the fair forms of children, and I hear:?"Suffer the little ones to come to me!"
PERSONS.
Here dwells the good old farmer, Israel,?In his ancestral home--a Puritan?Who reads his Bible daily, loves his God,?And lives serenely in the faith of Christ.?For threescore years and ten his life has run?Through varied scenes of happiness and woe;?But, constant through the