Charlotte Bronte – A Little Rhymed Story

Image from John Gushue … Dot Dot Dot

CHARLOTTE BRONTE.
(A Little Rhymed Story.)

The wind was blowing over the moors,
And the sun shone upon heather and ‘  whin,
On the grave stones hoary and gray with age
Which stand about Haworth vicarage,
And it streamed through a window in.

There, by herself, in a lonely room —
A lonely room which once held three —
Sat a woman at work with a busy pen,
‘Twas the woman all England praised just then
But what for its praise cared she?

Fame can not dazzle or flattery charm
One who goes lonely day by day
On the lonely moors, where the plovers cry,
And the sobbing wind as it hurries by
Has no comforting word to say.

So, famous and lonely and and she sat,
And steadily wrote the morning through;
Then, at stroke of twelve, laid her task aside
And out to the kitchen swiftly hied.
Now what was she going to do?

Why, Tabby, the servant, was “past her work,”
And her eyes had failed as her strength ran low,
And the toils once easy, had one by one
Become too hard or were left half done
By the aged hands and slow.

So, every day, without saying a word,
Her famous mistress laid down the pen,
Re kneaded the bread, or silently stole
The potatoes away in their wooden bowl
And pared them all over again.

She did not say, as she might have done,
“The less to the larger must give way,
These things are little, while I am great;
And the world will not always stand and wait
For the words that I have to say.”

No; the clever fingers that wrought so well,
And the eyes that could pierce to the heart’s intent,
She lent to the humble task and small;
Nor counted the time as lost at all,
So Tabby were but content!

Ah, genius burns like a blazing star,
And Fame has an honeyed urn to fill;
But the good deed done for love, not fame,
Like the water-cut in the Master’s name,
Is something more precious still.

— Susan Coolidge, in St. Nicholas.

Edwardsville Intelligencer (Edwardsville, Illinois) Dec 26, 1888

Tags: 1888, Charlotte Bronte, Poetry