BEHIND THE MASK.
Reading edition
It was an old, distorted face,— An uncouth visage, rough and wild; Yet from behind, with laughing grace, Peeped the fresh beauty of a child.
And so contrasting, fair and bright, It made me of my fancy ask If half earth's wrinkled grimness might Be but the baby in the mask.
Behind gray hairs and furrowed brow And withered look that life puts on, Each, as he wears it, comes to know How the child hides, and is not gone.
For, while the inexorable years To saddened features fit their mould, Beneath the work of time and tears Waits something that will not grow old!
And pain and petulance and care And wasted hope and sinful stain Shape the strange guise the soul doth wear, Till her young life look forth again.
The beauty of his boyhood's smile,— What human faith could find it now In yonder man of grief and guile,— A very Cain, with branded brow?
Yet, overlaid and hidden, still It lingers,—of his life a part; As the scathed pine upon the hill Holds the young fibres at its heart.
And, haply, round the Eternal Throne, Heaven's pitying angels shall not ask For that last look the world hath known, But for the face behind the mask!