The Deacon
By Mary Howarth
PROLOGUE
" Can Rowers that breathe one little day
In odorous sweetness life away,
And wavering to the earth decay.
Have any claim to rank with her,
Warmed in whose soul impulses stir,
Then bloom to goodness; and aver
Her worth through spheral joys shall move
When suns and systems cease above,
And nothing lives but perfect Love ? "
T) EST described in the words used by Thomas Woolner to
D express his Beautiful Lady, " A wild-rose blossom of the
wood " is Johanna. For her loveliness was rarely simple ; her
mind was rarely pure. Happy the man—so one would think—
who should snatch her from the bush, and in his bosom wear her.
Nevertheless Johanna when she married him who to her had
been her heart's rest from the day on which she first of all saw
him, married one in whose brightest moments but a faint concep-
tion of her wonderful beauties was apparent to himself. If
Johanna
By Mary Howarth
PROLOGUE
" Can Rowers that breathe one little day
In odorous sweetness life away,
And wavering to the earth decay.
Have any claim to rank with her,
Warmed in whose soul impulses stir,
Then bloom to goodness; and aver
Her worth through spheral joys shall move
When suns and systems cease above,
And nothing lives but perfect Love ? "
T) EST described in the words used by Thomas Woolner to
D express his Beautiful Lady, " A wild-rose blossom of the
wood " is Johanna. For her loveliness was rarely simple ; her
mind was rarely pure. Happy the man—so one would think—
who should snatch her from the bush, and in his bosom wear her.
Nevertheless Johanna when she married him who to her had
been her heart's rest from the day on which she first of all saw
him, married one in whose brightest moments but a faint concep-
tion of her wonderful beauties was apparent to himself. If
Johanna