Hens and Their Laureate

—The Poetical Works of Miss Nancy Luce, of West Tisbury, Dukes County, Massachusetts : thin, yellow, undeciduous, the wondrous volume lies before us, the sincerest exposition of a soul. No old-world Elzevir is like unto this. Fronting the first page is a pasted photograph of the author, a slender woman, in nunlike black, against the straight high back of a chair, with her faded face of Puritan length bound in a bandana, and her arms fondly clasping a hen, which figures in the ornate childish capitals below as “T. T. B. Pinky.” The bard wears an expression at once delicate and disconsolate, not unrelieved by an air of proud motherly solicitude. In the breast so close and kind to Pinky, the engaging biped, is hidden the patient tragedy of the Cape and of New England. Such a meek dark face as it is, droll and piteous, as of Sappho and Aspasia pent in,— the look of one who starves in arid intellectual soil, and who might, under any other than the present cosmic conditions, be guilty of a dangerous degree of intelligence, not giving up to poultry, surely, what was meant for mankind.

In these her complete and published works Miss Nancy utters what is within her. Boldly doth the barnyard abut upon the City of the Shining Ones, for her hold is strong upon both, and ornithology and theology run into each other like Giorgione’s light and shadow. I am not sufficiently versed in hymn lore to know anything further of many intermittent strophes than that they are equal to those of Wesley and of Dr. Watts, if they be not rather bone of their bone. Every now and then rises a spurt of sacred eloquence, as if a singing seraph had dropped suddenly’ among the heathen bipeds, to drown the trivial gossip of the nests with —

Miss Nancy’s profaner lyrics are of a sweeping Whitmanesque character, their dominant note being the iteration that

a tenet common to Charles II. of England (who lived up to that, and down to everything else), and to the liegemen of the affectionate Eastern religions, who hold “ that the soul of our grandam may haply inhabit a bird.” “ Be clever to them,” is Miss Nancy’s burden, and “be kind;” for you are to understand that

“If the will of God,” she says in prose, “could be done in full, it would be a great happiness among dumb creatures, and human, too.” This is the soundest philosophy. “The full rank of evil” is of our own recruiting, with the divine will, though not the divine toleration, foursquare against it. Nos, nos, dico aperte, nos consules desumus! And so honor is pushed to the wall, and so savages and hares and song-birds suffer. Since the cordial universal truce exists not, to one poet, at least, avenging comforts are in store. “If any one is cruel to dumb creatures, they will go to everlasting punishment, and have the greatest punishment.” Sinners will be “cut asunder hereafter;” and alas, they must “gnash theirteeth in agony.” Mark the insistent snap of these phrases. It may be assumed that the “ dumb creatures,” the plaintiffs, mean hens. Evidently no cat lies, with a charming indolent grace, by the West Tisbury hearthstone ; no vigilant collie parades the fields about. Cows, tm presumptive evidence, there be, for in Miss Nancy’s lists of recipes for such shocks as hen-flesh is heir to cures for bovine ailments figure; and as for horses, we quote one graphic sighing stanza : —

But hens do verily abound, a clucking and prinking host, to waft their mistress on to Parnassus. The moment prosody reaches them she becomes fluent, direct, elegiac. What is of most interest in these shrewish fowl is the manner of their several dissolutions ; and to them, with a sorrow which does not cloud her circumspection, the Muse turns in chronological order. Hear this, with its sudden incomparable attack and plunge into the annals of the deceased : —

and — steady, ladies and gentlemen ! —

And the epitaph, duly cut in the stone, is as finished and as fitted to its subject as Theocritus could have made it: —

Then there was “ Beauty Linna,” a young person of the same plumy persuasion, for whose sake, saith the poet, “I never took off none of my clothes for eighteen days and nights.” And of the prodigy “ Ada Queetie,” who “ could do fifty-four wonderful cunning things ” (“ Poor Sissy,” it seems, could do thirty-nine), we read with grave interest:—

“ Tweedle Tedel Bebee Pinky’s ” name reminds one of a Spanish infanta’s christening. There is a subtle distinction in the nomenclature of some of these feathery folk, and character in each. What a fine Magyar tang has “ Jantie Jafy ” ! You would say she had been at Szegedin with Kossuth in ’49. “ Peleanyo Appe,” “ Ka-

lally Roseiekey,” “ Levendy Ludandy,” — what a gypsy breadth and breeziuess in all these ! And there is “ Meleany Teatolly,” as if in whimsical reminiscence of an Irishman who had signed the pledge.

Peace to all good hens ! Some of these have been mild egg-laying ghosts for live and thirty years, in a little world where no hawks are, where society is more vegetarian, and where fifty-four terrene accomplishments may still have their happy round of development and variation. Peace, likewise, to their lady, who, though “dreadful wore down” and “murdered alive” with long sicknesses and with the cares of inissionary-in-ordinary to sagacious fowl, had yet charity for “professing inhabitants” and for “all the troubled in the wide world around ” ! In mid-September of 1888 she was translated ; avolavit, as Cotton Mather cunningly says of his Duxbury divine, the Rev. Ralph Partridge. The death of “ Ada Queetie,” sings the Friendy in her blank verse, very humbly and innocently,

And since her spirit afterwards cried aloud to “be landed in the best place,” we imagine that Miss Nancy’s paradise is to be shared with old loves, and that they and she, as ran her own stanch prophecy, have met together in some astrologer’s willing star.

Tread lightly ; for this is not unholy ground, and ours are no derisive gusts of laughter. Such power forever has the gracious reach of love ; it can never entirely be burlesqued and wasted, “ though some of it fall unseen and on barrenness.” Heart’s babble is the real Volapük. Austere Mary, the queen, cherishes a mishap, and stands with “ Calais ” graven on her breast ; and when a woman of the nineteenth century faces the ages, and reveals the blazon of “Tweedle Tedel Bebee Pinky,” they understand her also, and smile tenderly, and think that memory may not always be to the most memorable, save in the vagaries of private definition.

Let radiant Pallas keep her owl, so that among us giddy Greeks it shall never lack reverence. But the spouse of Chanticleer should likewise be apart and anointed (avaunt, thou fragrant vision of giblets!), to strut, saved, before mythologists, as avis lucis, — Miss Nancy Luce’s bird.