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The Deacon

By Mary Howarth

PROLOGUE

"Can flowers 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?"

Best described in the words used by Thomas Woolner to 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 conception of her wonderful beauties was apparent to himself. IfJohanna

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