Like as of myrrh a bundle is
my well-belov'd to be,
Through all the night betwixt my breasts
his lodging-place shall be;
My love as in Engedis vines
like camphire-bunch to me,
So fair, my love, thou fair thou art
thine eyes as doves eyes be."
Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school--that
safety-valve of young New England life--had not then been established or
even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical
love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old
meeting-house at Cicely as she sung.
But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book. She may
have been stately and prosperous and seated in the dignified "foreseat;"
she may have been feeble and infirm in her place in the "Deaf Pue;" and she
may have been careworn and sad, tired of fighting against poverty, worn
with dread of fierce Indians, weary of the howls of the wolves in the dense
forests so near, and home-sick and longing for the yonderland, her "faire
Englishe home;" but were she sad or careworn or heartsick, in her treasured
psalm-book she found comfort,--comfort in the halting verses as well as
in the noble thoughts of the Psalmist. And the glamour of eternal,
sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the
inscription in the old psalm-book,--
"In youth I praise
And walk thy ways,"--
the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole
New World was young.
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