In the autumn of 1889, before the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, a new poem appeared in the third volume of The Home-Maker, an illustrated magazine edited by prolific American author Mary Virginia Terhune under the pen name of Marion Harland. The new piece was written by Sara Webb Vilas, a poet about whom the National Bell Festival could find little biographical detail. Have a tip? Send us a note!
What crumbs we could find of Sara Webb Vilas were limited to a small handful of short poems contributed the year before to an earlier volume of The Home-Maker, as well as a reprint the same year in The Republican Journal. Without a biographical narrative of the poet or insight into the motivation behind this piece, we’re left to ruminate solely on the author’s words of religious devotion, which delight the mind’s eye through an anthropomorphic conversation with a distant bell tower.
Image: Full-page illustration (see page 214) accompanying the poem “My Shrine” by Sara Webb Vilas in The Home-Maker, Vol. 3 (Oct. 1889 to March 1890) – a monthly magazine edited by prolific American author Mary Virginia Terhune under the pen name of Marion Harland. Courtesy: The Home-Maker Company, New York.
"My Shrine"
Sara Webb Vilas
Flushed warmth within; without, white cold;
In library-chamber vast and old,
I, basking in the fragrant red
By logs of birch and cedar fed, ¬–
So still the night, – heard, toll on toll,
The distant belfry call to soul
Belated, or distraught with sin,
To pray the holy Christmas in.
From carven mantel, grim and brown,
The Virgin and her Son looked down;
At right and left knelt martyr-saint;
Tulips and roses, fashioned quaint,
Bloomed at their feet, and cherubs’ eyes
Surveyed them with a glad surprise.
Was ‘t midnight-bell
That wrought the spell,
Or incensed glow,
That, flickering slow,
Showed graven shapes instinct with life?
While, breaking forth in tuneful strife,
Like fall of streams and hymn of birds,
Weird music throbbed and soared in words; –
(The while the far-off rhythmic beat
Of towered bell chimed low and sweet,)
The story of the ages grew, –
Tales of the tempted and the true;
Of vanquished Self and Vice withstood,
And Evil beaten down by Good;
How saints had lived; how martyrs died
By sword and rack and scourge and tide;
Had found in dungeon trysting-place,
And clasped the stake in rapt embrace.
And evermore,
And o’er and o’er,
Angelic tongues
Blended the songs,
Harmonious billows of one sea, –
“This have we done, dear Christ, for THEE!”
Now, far and faint, now, near and clear, –
“All hail to Thee! O Christ most dear!”
The bell made answer,
Straight and strange,
On chime and voicings fell a change,
From age-browned oak on me were bent
Regards of griefful wonderment.
“And thou? And thou?
Art silent now?
For sun and showers,
For fruit and flowers,
For watch and ward by night and day;
For dangers ‘scaped in darksome way;
For hourly grace and passion reined;
Foes reconciled and friends retained;
For ransom paid and debt forgiven;
For love and life and hope of heaven, –
Hast thou no need of praise to bring?”
“And thou? And thou?” The voicéd ring
Still calls my humbled soul to prayer,
While flares and falls the perfumed glare
On carvéd saint and Child divine. –
To me, this Christmas-tide, a Shrine!
Cover image: A view at night of snow-covered roofs and illuminated bell towers in Zurich, Switzerland.
