The Home Circle by Mrs. Helen Barron Bostwick

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 20, 1882

The Home Circle.

By Mrs. Helen Barron Bostwick

THE KING'S PICTURE.

The king from his council chamber Came weary and sore of heart; He called for Ilaff the painter, And spoke to him thus, apart: "I am sickened of faces ignoble, Hypocrites, cowards, and knaves; I shall shrink to their shrunken measure, Chief slave in a realm of slaves!

"Paint me a man perfected, Gracious and wise and good, Dowered with the strength of heroes, And a beauty like womanhood. It shall hang in my inmost chamber, That thither when I retire, It may fill my soul with its grandeur, And warm it with holy fire."

So the artist painted the picture— It hung on the palace wall— Never a thing so goodly Had garnished the stately hall. The king, with his head uncovered, Gazed on it with rapt delight, Till it suddenly wore strange meaning, And baffled his questioning sight.

For the form was his supplest courtier's, Perfect in every limb; But the bearing was that of the henchman Who filled the flagons for him. The brow was a priest's, who pondered His parchments early and late; The eyes were a wandering minstrel's, Who sang at the palace gate.

The lips—half sad and half mirthful, With a flitting, tremulous grace, Ah me! were the lips of a woman He had kissed in the market-place. But the smile that their curve transfigured (As a rose by its chrism of dew), Was the smile of the wife that loved him, Queen Ethelyn, good and true.

"Dost read, O king," said the artist, "This truth which the picture tells— How in every form of the human Some hint of the highest dwells? How, scanning humanity's temples, For the place where the veil is thin, We may gather by beautiful glimpses The form of the good within?"

—Mrs. Helen Barron Bostwick.