I gave it in my best manner, standing in the center of the circle. I
did not expect applause. But I got more than applause. I am not going
to try to describe the look that came into the eyes of the oldest
boy--the nearest that I can come to it is to say that it was the look
of a child waked from a deep sleep, and gazing wide-eyed upon a new
world.
He came straight toward me. "Where--did you--git--them words?" he
asked in a breathless sort of way.
"A man wrote them--a man named Noyes."
"Are they true?"
"Yes."
"Say them again."
It was not a request. It was a command. And I did say them, and saw a
soul's awakening.
Oh, there are people who won't believe that it can be done like
that--in a moment. But that boy was ready. He had dreamed and until
now no one had ever put the dreams into words for him. He cannot read,
has probably never heard a fairy tale--the lore of this region is
gruesome and ghostly, rather than lovely and poetic.
Perhaps, 'way back, five, six generations, some ancestor of this lad
may have drifted into London town, perhaps the bells sang to him, and
subconsciously this sand-hill child was illumined by that inherited
memory. Somewhere in the back of his mind bells have been chiming, and
he has not known enough to call them bells. However that may be, my
verses revealed to him a new heaven and a new earth.
Without knowing anything, he is ready for everything. Perhaps there
are others like him. Cousin Patty says there are girls. She insists
that the girls need cook-books, not poetry, but I am not sure.
I shall go again to the pines, and teach that boy first by telling him
things, then I shall take books. I haven't been as interested in
anything for years as I am in that boy.
So, will you think of me as seeing, faintly, the Vision? Your eyes are
clearer than mine. You can see farther; and what you see, will you
tell me?
And now about Barry. I know how hard it is to have him leave you, and
that under all your talk of trumpets blowing and flags flying, there's
the ache and the heart-break. I cannot see why such things should come
to you. The rest of us probably deserve what we get. But you--I
should like to think of you always as in a garden--you have the power
to make things bloom. You have even quickened the dry dust of my own
dead life, so that now in it there's a little plot of the pansies of my
thoughts of you, and there's rosemary, for remembrance, and there's the
little bed of my interest in that boy--what seeds did you plant for it?