Читать книгу Threads of Grey and Gold - Reed Myrtle - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The quaint old steel engraving which shows George and Martha Washington sitting by a table, while the Custis children stand dutifully by, is a familiar picture in many households, yet few of us remember that the first Lady of the White House was not always first in the heart of her husband.

The years have brought us, as a people, a growing reverence for him who was in truth the “Father of His Country.” Time has invested him with godlike attributes, yet, none the less, he was a man among men, and the hot blood of youth ran tumultuously in his veins.

At the age of fifteen, like many another schoolboy, Washington fell in love. The man who was destined to be the Commander of the Revolutionary Army, wandered through the shady groves of Mount Vernon composing verses which, from a critical standpoint, were very bad. Scraps of verse were later mingled with notes of surveys, and interspersed with the accounts which that methodical statesman kept from his school-days until the year of his death.

In the archives of the Capitol on a yellowed page, in Washington’s own handwriting, these lines are still to be read:

“Oh, Ye Gods, why should my Poor Resistless Heart

Stand to oppose thy might and Power,

At last surrender to Cupid’s feather’d Dart,

And now lays bleeding every Hour

For her that’s Pityless of my grief and Woes,

And will not on me, pity take.

I’ll sleep amongst my most inveterate Foes,

And with gladness never wish to wake.

In deluding sleepings let my Eyelids close,

That in an enraptured Dream I may

In a soft lulling sleep and gentle repose

Possess those joys denied by Day.”

Among these boyish fragments there is also an incomplete acrostic, evidently intended for Miss Frances Alexander, which reads as follows:

“From your bright sparkling Eyes I was undone;

Rays, you have, rays more transparent than the Sun

Amidst its glory in the rising Day;

None can you equal in your bright array;

Constant in your calm, unspotted Mind;

Equal to all, but will to none Prove kind,

So knowing, seldom one so young you’ll Find.

“Ah, woe’s me that I should Love and conceal—

Long have I wished, but never dare reveal,

Even though severely Love’s Pains I feel;

Xerxes that great wast not free from Cupid’s Dart,

And all the greatest Heroes felt the smart.”

He wrote at length to several of his friends concerning his youthful passions. In the tell-tale pages of the diary, for 1748, there is this draft of a letter: