Rewritten of his Father's messenger,
With meekness, whose divinity is more
Than power and glory, he returned again
To his disciples, and awaked their sleep,
For he that should betray him was at hand.
Gibeah, the Mount.
RIZPAH WITH HER SONS.
THE DAY BEFORE THEY WERE HANGED ON GIBEAH.
for my mother!" said the voice of one Darkening the door of Rizpah. She looked up,
And lo! the princely countenance and mien
Of dark-browed Armoni. The eye of Saul,
The very voice and presence of the king,
Limb, port, and majesty, were present there,
Mocked like an apparition in her son.
Yet, as he stooped his forehead to her hand
With a kind smile, a something of his mother
Unbent the haughty arching of his lip,
And through the darkness of the widow's heart
Trembled a nerve of tenderness that shook
Her thought of pride all suddenly to tears.
"Whence comest thou?" said Rizpah.
Of David. In his gate there stood a soldier,
This in his hand. I plucked it, and I said,
'A king's son takes it for his hungry mother!'
God stay the famine!"
As he spoke, a step, Light as an antelope's, the threshold pressed, And like beam of light into the room Entered Mephibosheth. What bird of heaven Or creature of the wild, what flower of earth, Was like this fairest of the sons of Saul! The violet's cup was harsh to his blue eye. Less agile was the fierce barb's fiery step. His voice drew hearts to him. His smile was like The incarnation of some blessed dream, Its joyousness so sunned the gazer's eye! Fair were his locks. His snowy teeth divided A bow of love, drawn with a scarlet thread. His cheek was like the moist heart of the rose; And, but for nostrils of that breathing fire That turns the lion back, and limbs as lithe As is the velvet muscle of the pard, Mephibosheth had been too fair for man.
As if he were a vision that would fade,
Rizpah gazed on him. Never, to her eye,
Grew his bright form familiar; but, like stars,
That seemed each night new lit in a new heaven,
He was each morn's sweet gift to her. She loved
Her firstborn, as a mother loves her child,
Tenderly, fondly. But for him, the last,
What had she done for Heaven to be his mother!
Her heart rose in her throat to hear his voice;
She looked at him forever through her tears;
Her utterance, when she spoke to him, sank down,
As if the lightest thought of him had lain
In an unfathomed cavern of her soul.
The morning light was part of him, to her
What broke the day for but to show his beauty?
The hours but measured time till he should come;
Too tardy sang the bird when he was gone;
She would have shut the flowers, and called the star
Back to the mountain-top, and bade the sun
Pause at eve's golden door, to wait for him!
Was this a heart gone wild, or is the love
Of mothers like a madness? Such as this
Is many a poor one in her humble home,
Who silently and sweetly sits alone,
Pouring her life all out upon her child.
What cares she that he does not feel how close
Her heart beats after his, that all unseen
Are the fond thoughts that follow him by day,
And watch his sleep like angels? And, when moved
By some sore needed Providence, he stops
In his wild path and lifts a thought to heaven,
What cares the mother that he does not see
The link between the blessing and her prayer!
"And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the Lord; and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley-harvest."
"And Rizpali, the daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night."-2 Samuel xxi. 9, 10.
EAR what the desolate Rizpah said,
As on Gibeah's rocks she watched the dead.
The sons of Michal before her lay,
And her own fair children, dearer than they:
By a death of shame they all had died,
And were stretched on the bare rock, side by side.
And Rizpah, once the loveliest of all
That bloomed and smiled in the court of Saul,
All wasted with watching and famine now,
And scorched by the sun her haggard brow,
Sat, mournfully guarding their corpses there,
And murmured a strange and solemn air;
The low, heart-broken, and wailing strain
Of a mother that mourns her children slain.
"I have made the crags my home, and spread
On their desert backs my sackcloth bed;
I have eaten the bitter herb of the rocks,
And drunk the midnight dew in my locks;
I have wept till I could not weep, and the pain
Of my burning eyeballs went to my brain.
Seven blackened corpses before me lie,
In the blaze of the sun and the winds of the sky.
I have watched them through the burning day,
And driven the vulture and raven away;
And the cormorant wheeled in circles round,
Yet feared to alight on the guarded ground.
And, when the shadows of twilight came,
I have seen the hyena's eyes of flame,
And heard at my side his stealthy tread,
But aye at my shout the savage fled:
And I threw the lighted brand, to fright
The jackal and wolf that yelled in the night.
"Ye were foully murdered, my hapless sons,
By the hands of wicked and cruel ones;
Ye fell, in your fresh and blooming prime,
All innocent, for your father's crime.
He sinned, but he paid the price of his guilt
When his blood by a nameless hand was spilt ;
When he strove with the heathen host in vain,
And fell with the flower of his people slain,
And the sceptre his children's hands should sway
From his injured lineage passed away.
"But I hoped that the cottage roof would be A safe retreat for my sons and me;
And that while they ripened to manhood fast,
They should wean my thoughts from the woes of the
And my bosom swelled with a mother's pride,
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