I tell you love has naught to do With meetness or unmeetness.

"Itself its best excuse, it asks

No leave of pride or fashion When silken zone or homespun frock It stirs with throbs of passion.

Looked down to see love's miracle,
The giving that is gaining.

'And so the farmer found a wife,
His mother found a daughter:
There looks no happier home than hers
On pleasant Bearcamp Water.

360

Your winning graces hither

As free as if from cradle-time We two had played together.

320

The careful ways of duty;

Our hard, stiff lines of life with her
Are flowing curves of beauty.

'Our homes are cheerier for her sake,
Our door-yards brighter blooming,
And all about the social air
Is sweeter for her coming.

Unspoken homilies of peace Her daily life is preaching; The still refreshment of the dew Is her unconscious teaching.

'And never tenderer hand than hers Unknits the brow of ailing;

Her garments to the sick man's ear Have music in their trailing.

And when, in pleasant harvest moons, The youthful huskers gather,

Or sleigh-drives on the mountain ways Defy the winter weather,

In sugar-camps, when south and warm The winds of March are blowing, And sweetly from its thawing veins The maple's blood is flowing, —

In summer, where some lilied pond
Its virgin zone is baring,
Or where the ruddy autumn fire
Lights up the apple-paring,-

'The coarseness of a ruder time
Her finer mirth displaces,
A subtler sense of pleasure fills
Each rustic sport she graces.

370

380

390

'Her presence lends its warmth and health To all who come before it. If woman lost us Eden, such

As she alone restore it.

" For larger life and wiser aims The farmer is her debtor;

Or winter-crowned and hoary,

The ridged horizon lifts for him

Its inner veils of glory.

All hearts to her inclining;

Not less for him his household light That others share its shining.'

460

470

1 See the note on Longfellow's 'Evangeline,' p. 121. Whittier wrote to Mrs. Fields in November, 1870: You know that a thousand of the Acadians were distributed among the towns of Massachusetts, where they were mostly treated as paupers.' In the letter already quoted in the note on Evangeline, he says: The chil

dren were bound out to the families in the localities in which they resided; and I wrote a poem upon finding, in the records of Haverhill, the indenture that bound an Acadian girl as a servant in one of the families of that neighborhood. Gathering the story of her death, I wrote "Marguerite."