Beautiful Snow
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
Yet every sane person who stops to think of it knows that the Judge was wise to ride away back to his own circle and manner of life, and that if he had not done so, if he had tarried and married, instead of a little tender melancholy, he would have had a lifelong tragedy on his hands. Bret Harte perceived this, and had the courage, in a poem called “Mrs. Judge Jenkins,” to describe clearly and accurately what would undoubtedly have happened had the Judge led Maud back to his “garnished rooms”—the twins who looked too much like the men who raked the hay on old Muller’s farm, Maud growing broad and red and stout—
And looking down that dreary track,
He half regretted that he came back;
For, had he waited, he might have wed
Some maiden fair and thoroughbred;
For there be women as fair as she,
Whose verbs and nouns do more agree.
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