IN WAR TIME
And ere the boy, said the Monmouth wives, had grown to his seventh year,
Well could you tell whose mantling blood swelled in his temples clear.
Tall, and bent in the meeting brows; swarthy of hair and face;
Shoulders parting square, but set with the future huntsman's grace;
Eyes alive with a fire which yet the old man's visage wore
At times, like the flash of a thunder-cloud when the storm is almost o'er.
3
Toward the mettled stripling, then, the heart of the old man yearned;
And thus—while Hermann Van Ghelt once more, with a restless hunger, turned
From the grave of her who died so young, to his books and lawyer's gown,
And the ceaseless clangor of mind with mind in the close and wrangling town—
They two, the boy and the grandsire, lived at the manor-house, and grew,
The one to all manly arts apace, the other a youth anew—
Pleased with the boy's free spirit, and teaching him, step by step, to wield
The mastery over living things, and the craft of flood and field.
Apt, indeed, was the scholar; and born with a subtle art to gain
The love of all dumb creatures at will; now lifting himself, by the mane,
Over the neck of the three-year colt, for a random bareback ride,
Now chasing the waves on the rifted beach at the turn of the evening tide.
20
