But Once

By Marion Harland.[1]

We pass this way but once, dear heart;

Musing beside the birch-log’s glow,

The murmur of the mighty mart,

Borne to us through the falling snow.

Our talk is of a buried day;

Between us and the embers red,

Are flickering phantoms, wan and gray,

Sad wraiths of loves and hopes long dead.

We pass this way but once.  ‘Tho hard

The road we climb in frost and heat,

Through deep defiles—and sharp the shard

‘Gainst which we dash our hurrying feet—

Our toil and pain leave scanty trace,

A bloodstain on a displaced stone;

Vague lettering on a boulder’s face

Perchance the echo of a moan.

We pass this way but once.  The seed

We idly strew, or plant with tears,

Is gone for aye: We may not heed

Its death or growth in future years.

We clutch at gold, and grasp dead leaves.

We sow spring wealth of hopes and cares;

Others will gather in our sheaves,

And, cursing us—will burn our tares.

With your true eyes on mine, dear heart

As at the margin of the Sea

Which you and me some day must part—

Forget all that we would not be,

Tread down the Wrong, live out the Right,

Strong in God’s love and love for men;

Then from the hill-top be our flight—

We shall not pass this way again.

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[1] Forgotten today by all but a handful of women’s domestic and literary historians, Marion Harland (1830-1922) was one of the best known American women in the nineteenth century. She was the author of some 75 works of fiction and domestic advice, hundreds of magazine articles and short stories, and a series of syndicated newspaper advice columns. It is not extravagant to say that Marion Harland was, for many readers, the Julia Child, Danielle Steel, and Dear Abby of her day.

Marion Harland was born Mary Virginia Hawes in rural Virginia. After a young womanhood spent in Richmond, where she adopted her pen name and published her first best-selling novel, Alone (1854), she married Reverend Edward Payson Terhune, and thereafter lived in the North. Her most famous volume, Common Sense in the Household (1871), was a cookbook enlivened with pungent commentary. It sold over a million copies and remained in print for half a century. She was a lifelong supporter of the cult of domesticity, but promoted an ideal of womanhood that was strong, intellectual, and capable of independent living. A wife and mother herself, she was supremely well-organized and managed a full time career as a writer while running a household, assisting her husband’s ministry, and directing charities. Her prodigious activity was fueled by a powerful ego and a need for adulation that appear starkly at odds with the modest domestication she recommended for other women. But she remained largely unconflicted herself, serenely managing her life, work, and those around her with imperiousness tempered by a warmth and vivacity that endeared her to many.

Marion Harland continued to write and publish until just before her death at ninety-one.  (Source: Karen Manners Smith, University of Massachusetts Amherst, in her dissertation Marion Harland: the making of a household word)