Some
day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten
million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life
worth living--Liberty, Justice, and Right--is marked "For
White People Only."
XI
Of the Passing of the First-Born
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood crying yet,
WHO HATH REMEMBERED ME? WHO HATH FORGOTTEN?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
SWINBURNE.
"Unto you a child is born," sang the bit of yellow paper that
fluttered into my room one brown October morning. Then the
fear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I
wondered how it looked and how it felt--what were its eyes,
and how its hair curled and crumpled itself. And I thought in
awe of her,--she who had slept with Death to tear a man-child
from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously wan-
dering. I fled to my wife and child, repeating the while to
myself half wonderingly, "Wife and child? Wife and child?"--
fled fast and faster than boat and steam-car, and yet must ever
impatiently await them; away from the hard-voiced city, away
from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire Hills that sit
all sadly guarding the gates of Massachusetts.
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