The courtship of Miles Standish . ous spindle,While with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together,Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard,Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the was the book from whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem,She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest,Making the humble house and the modest apparel of homespunBeautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!
The courtship of Miles Standish . ous spindle,While with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together,Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard,Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the was the book from whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem,She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest,Making the humble house and the modest apparel of homespunBeautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!Over him rushed, like a wind that is keen and cold and relentless,Thoughts of what might have been, and the weight and woe of his errand;All the dreams that had faded, and all the hopes that had vanished,All his life henceforth a dreary and tenantless mansion,Haunted by vain regrets, and pallid, sorrowful he said to himself, and almost fiercely he said it:Let not him that putteth his hand to the plow look backward; 48. THE> LOVERS ERRAND Though the plowsnare cut through the fioweis of life to its fountains,Though it pass oer the graves of the dead and the hearths of the living,It is the will of the Lord; and His mercy endureth for ever 1 Ss he entered the house: and the hum of the wheel and the singingSuddenly ceased; for Priscilla, aroused by his step on the threshold,Rose as he entered, and gave him her hand, in signal of welcome,Saying, I knew it was you, when I heard your step in the passage;For I was thinking of you, as I sat there singing and and dumb with delight, that a thought of him had been mingledThus in the sacred psalm, that came from the heart of the maiden,Silent before her he stood, and gave her the flowers for an answer,Finding no words for his thought. He remembered that day in the winter,After the first great snow, when he broke a path from the village,Reeling and plunging along through the drifts that encumbered the doorwaySt
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Keywords: ., bookauthorlongfell, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookyear1903
