The Judge’s Last Tune
The Judge took down his fiddle,
And put his feet on the stove,
And heaved a sigh from his middle
That might have been fat, or love;
He leaned his head on the mantel,
And bent his ear to the strings,
And the tender chords awakened
The echoes of many things.
The Bar had enjoyed the measure,
The Bench and Senate had been
Amused at the simple pleasure
He drew from his violin;
But weary of power and duty,
He had laid them down with a sigh,
Exhausted of life the beauty,
And he fiddled he knew not why.
In the days when passion budded,
And she in the churchyard lain
Came over his books as he studied
With an exquisite pang of pain,
He played to his sons their mother’s
Old favorites ere she wed;
Those tunes, like hundreds of others,
Were requiems of the dead.
They lay in the kirk’s inclosure:
All three, in the shadows dim,
In a cenotaph’s cynosure
That waited for only him,
Who sat with his fiddle tuning
On the spot where his fame was won,
On the empty world communing,
Without a wife or a son.
And he drew his bow so plaintive
And loud, like a human cry,
That the light of the shutter darkened
From somebody passing by.
A young man peeped at the pensive
Great man, so familiar known;
His features, if inoffensive,
Were like to the judge’s own.
“Come in,” cried the politician—
“Come not,” his soul would have said—
“Thou bringest to me a vision
Of a sin ere thy mother wed,
When I, wild boy from college,
Her humble desert o’ercame,
And we hid the guilty knowledge
Beneath thy father’s name.”
The youth delayed no longer,
His sense of music strong,
Nor knew of his mother’s wronger,
Nor that she had known a wrong;
Deep in the grave the secret
Her husband might never guess.
He stood before his father
With a loyal gentleness.
“What tune, fair boy, desirest
My old friend’s worthy son?—
Say but what thou requirest,
And for father’s sake ’tis done.”
“Oh! Judge, our State’s defender,
Whose life has all been power,
Play me the tune most tender,
When thou felt thy greatest hour!”
The old man thought a minute,
Irresolutely stirred,
As if his fiddle’s humor
Changed like a mocking-bird;
Then, as his tears came raining
Upon the plaintive chords,
He played the invitation
To the sinner, of his Lord’s.
“Come, poor and needy sinners,
And weak and sick, and sore,
The patient Jesus lingers
To draw you through the door.”
It was a tune remembered
From old revival nights,
In crowded country churches,
Where dimly blew the lights.
And boys grew superstitious
To hear the mourners wail.
The great man, self-degraded,
So sighed his contrite tale
In notes that failed for sobbing,
To feel Heaven’s sentence well,
That took away his Isaac
And blessed the Ishmael.
Low in the tomb of glory
The old man’s ashes lie—
Unuttered this my story,
Unwritten to human eye;
And the young man, blessed and blessing,
Walks over the shady town,
The evil passions repressing,
And his head bent humbly down.
Perhaps he marvels why treasure
Of the judge to his credit is set,
And an old revival measure
Should have been the statesman’s pet.
But he hears the invitation,
And sees the streaming eyes
Of the old man lost to the nation,
And forgiven beyond the skies.