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The poem moves like a symphony, weaving together requiem, cradle-song, battle-march, and psalm, to a consummation of tender and majestic peace. As the recurrent theme which governs the whole may be taken this: "How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affection bold, Should be the man whose thoughts would hold An hour's communion with the dead."
Fairfax objected to Joss in the house, lest he should bite the children, and Janey and Ranby were not entirely at her beck and call as formerly. The incompetent Sally, who sang a sweet cradle-song, became quite a personage and sovereign in the nursery, and was jealous of Miss Fairfax's intrusion into her domain.
She had heard that music charmed wild beasts, just this point between life and death intensified every faculty, and when she opened her lips the third time, it was not for shrieking, but for singing. A little thread of melody stole out, a rill of tremulous motion; it was the cradle-song with which she rocked her baby; how could she sing that?
Love had been the cradle-song of his infancy, love was the requiem of his youth. His was no romantic fable, no heroic epic; adventures, passions, fame, made up none of its incidents; it was simply the history of a boy's manful struggling against fate of the quiet heroism of endurance, compensated by inward satisfaction, if not by actual happiness.
Then my hair, blowing across my eyes, blotted out the pleasant picture, and the hoarse shouting of the sea drove the sweet cradle-song from my ears. Georgie's voice stopped my weary sobbing. "Allie," he said, softly, "mamma told me that true knights prayed for help when they were fighting. So I shall ask God to help us now. I think He will."
"Him bird him button," replied the imperturbable one. "Seeing Kaviak's feather reminded me of a native cradle-song that's a kind of a story, too. It's been roughly translated." "Can you say it?" "I used to know how it went." He began in a deep voice: "'The wind blows over the Yukon. My husband hunts deer on the Koyukun mountains. Ahmi, ahmi, sleep, little one.
She once more arrayed herself in smiles, and again took part in the festivities which now were filling the halls of St. Cloud, Malmaison, and the Tuileries, and which, too, were but the dying lay of the swan of the republic, or, if you will, the cradle-song of reviving monarchy.
I rolled in the seeded grass and chuckled, as I thought of what a day or two might bring about, and I murmured to myself an old cradle-song of Devon which she loved and often sang; and was, ere I knew it, carolling aloud, for pure wantonness and joy that Monsieur de Puysange was not likely to have me whipped, now, however blatantly I might elect to discourse.
The orderlies have put him on a neighbouring bed while they make his. He stays there very quietly, his bandaged stumps in view, and sings a little song, like a child's cradle-song. Then, all of a sudden, he begins to cry, sobbing aloud. I put my arm round him and ask anxiously: "Why? What is the matter?" Then he answers in a broken voice: "I am crying with joy and thankfulness." Oh!
And though she was but a wild, wayward, mischievous gamin, a gamin all over, though in a girl's form, men would tell in camp and hospital, with great tears coursing down their brown, scarred cheeks, how her touch would lie softly as a snowflake on their heated foreheads; how her watch would be kept by them through long nights of torment; how her gifts of golden trinkets would be sold or pawned as soon as received to buy them ice or wine; and how in their delirium the sweet, fresh voice of the child of the regiment would soothe them, singing above their wretched beds some carol or chant of their own native province, which it always seemed she must know by magic; for, were it Basque or Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a mountain-song of the Orientales, were it a mere, ringing rhyme for the mules of Alsace, or a wild, bold romanesque from the country of Berri Cigarette knew each and all, and never erred by any chance, but ever sung to every soldier the rhythm familiar from his infancy, the melody of his mother's cradle-song and of his first love's lips.
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