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| ’T WAS but a poor little room: a farm-servant’s loft in a garret; | |
| One small window and door; never a chimney at all; | |
| One little stool by the bed, and a remnant of cast-away carpet; | |
| But on the floor, by the wall, carefully dusted and bright, | |
| Stood the green-painted box, our Dorothy’s closet and wardrobe, | 5 |
| Holding her treasures, her all—all that she own’d in the world! | |
| Linen and hosen were there, coarse linen and home-knitted hosen; | |
| Handkerchiefs bought at the fair, aprons and smocks not a few; | |
| Kirtles for warmth when afield, and frocks for winter and summer, | |
| Blue-spotted, lilac, gray; cotton and woolen and serge; | 10 |
| All her simple attire, save the clothes she felt most like herself in— | |
| Rough, coarse workaday clothes, fit for a laborer’s wear. | |
| There was her Sunday array—the boots, and the shawl, and the bonnet, | |
| Solemnly folded apart, not to be lightly assumed; | |
| There was her jewelry, too: ’t was a brooch (she had worn it this evening) | 15 |
| Made of cairngorm stone—really too splendid for her! | |
| Which on a Martlemas Day Mr. Robert had bought for a fairing: | |
| Little she thought, just then, how she would value it now! | |
| As for her sewing gear, her housewife, her big brass thimble, | |
| Knitting and suchlike work, such as her fingers could do, | 20 |
| That was away downstairs, in a dresser-drawer in the kitchen, | |
| Ready for use of a night, when she was tidied and clean. | |
| Item, up there in the chest were her books: “The Dairyman’s Daughter;” | |
| Ballads; “The Olney Hymns;” Bible and Prayer-book, of course: | |
| That was her library; these were the limits of Dorothy’s reading; | 25 |
| Wholesome, but scanty indeed: was it then all that she knew? | |
| Nay, for like other good girls, she had profited much by her schooling | |
| Under the mighty three—Nature, and Labor, and Life: | |
| Mightier they than books; if books could have only come after, | |
| Thoughts of instructed minds filtering down into hers. | 30 |
| That was impossible now; what she had been, she was, and she would be; | |
| Only a farm-serving lass—only a peasant, I fear! | |
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| Well—on that green-lidded box, her name was painted in yellow; | |
| Dorothy Crump were the words. Crump? What a horrible name! | |
| Yes, but they gave it to her, because (like the box) ’t was her mother’s; | 35 |
| Ready to hand—though of course she had no joy in the name: | |
| She had no kin—and indeed, she never had needed a surname; | |
| Never had used one at all, never had made one her own: | |
| “Dolly” she was to herself, and to every one else she was “Dolly”; | |
| Nothing but “Dolly”; and so, that was enough for a name. | 40 |
| Thus then, her great, green box, her one undoubted possession, | |
| Stood where it was; like her, “never went nowhere” at all; | |
| Waited, perhaps, as of old, some beautiful Florentine bride-chest, | |
| Till, in the fulness of time, He, the Beloved, appears.— | |
| Was there naught else in her room? nothing handy for washing or dressing? | 45 |
| Yes; on a plain deal stand, basin, and ewer, and dish: | |
| All of them empty, unused; for the sink was the place of her toilet; | |
| Save on a Sunday—and then, she too could dress at her ease; | |
| Then, by the little sidewall of the diamonded dormer-window | |
| She at a sixpenny glass brush’d out her bonny bright hair. | 50 |
| Ah, what a poor little room! Would you like to sleep in it, ladies? | |
| Innocence sleeps there unharm’d; Honor, and Beauty, and Peace— | |
| Love, too, has come; and with these, even dungeons were easily cheerful; | |
| But, for our Dorothy’s room, it is no dungeon at all. | |
| No! through the latticed panes of the diamonded dormer-window | 55 |
| Dorothy looks on a world free and familiar and fair: | |
| Looks on the fair farm-yard, where the poultry and cattle she lives with | |
| Bellow and cackle and low—music delightful to her; | |
| Looks on the fragrant fields, with cloud-shadows flying above them, | |
| Singing of birds in the air, woodlands and waters around. | 60 |
| She in those fragrant meads has wrought, every year of her girlhood; | |
| Over those purple lands she, too, has follow’d the plough; | |
| And, like a heifer afield, or a lamb that is yean’d in the meadows, | |
| She, to herself and to us, seems like a part of it all. | |
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