A Lawyer's Romance by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Name: A Lawyer's Romance
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"A Lawyer's Romance" is a narrative poem in which a middle-aged attorney, exhausted by decades of professional toil and urban life, retreats for a summer to a tranquil vine-covered cottage in the countryside. The setting — a hillside property with a garden of larkspur, bleeding hearts, phlox, and rose trees — is rendered in rich pastoral detail, establishing the contrast between the narrator's workaday world and this brief idyll. Now fifty years old and having never experienced romantic love, the lawyer falls for Mable, a young woman with amber eyes and dusky brown hair who tends the garden. He attempts to conceal his feelings but, overcome in a July twilight near the rose trees, declares himself. She accepts him with a shy smile. He frames his triumph in legal terms — he has pleaded a case, won it, and claims his fee in kisses — a conceit that speaks to how his professional identity has colonized every corner of his inner life. The summer months pass in bliss: moonlit rows on the lake, harvest songs drifting across the fields, afternoons of undisguised happiness. The narrator reflects that what youth dreams of in spring arrived for him only in the autumn of his life — a second-act fulfillment he had long since stopped expecting. He gave himself entirely to this love, holding nothing in reserve. The romance ends in betrayal. He discovers Mable in the arms of a young man, a beardless youth to whom she whispers, "My only love, my own." The narrator's illusion collapses. He does not condemn either party harshly; he acknowledges that the young man was also eventually discarded by Mable and moved on to another love. Mable herself died young — repentant, and, the narrator allows charitably, presumably forgiven by heaven. The poem's closing movement is one of measured resignation rather than bitterness. The narrator returned to his legal practice and his orderly, solitary life. He does not generalize Mable's inconstancy into a verdict on all women; he uses the image of a worm found in one rose as an argument against condemning every flower. But he confesses that he loved so completely and so late that the capacity was spent — there could be no second love, because he drained the cup entirely and shattered it. His attitude toward the future is calm and undramatic. He has had his day of joy and his night of sorrow. He credits God with having seen him through the grief without being able to explain precisely how. The poem closes on a quiet eschatological hope: that the dream interrupted in this life may be finished and completed in the afterlife, "by the shining Jasper sea" — a phrase drawn from the Book of Revelation's vision of the New Jerusalem, suggesting that the romantic fulfillment denied him on earth may await him in eternity. The poem belongs to Wilcox's characteristic mode of sentimental verse that takes emotional autobiography as its raw material and shapes it into a recognizable type — here, the man who loved too late, too fully, and too honestly for a world in which such love does not always find its counterpart. The lawyer's professional detachment and the romantic's total surrender coexist in the narrator without resolution, making him a figure of sympathy rather than pathos.

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox · First published 1873 · Genre: Romance, Narrative Poetry, Tragedy · 1,679 words

First lines

Into the mellow light of the cloudless autumn day, / Somehow, the vision slips, of a landscape, far away, / Wherever I turn my eyes, it hovers before them still, / The little, vine-wreathed cot, on the southerly slope of the hill,

The pasture at the left, the ducks a-swim in the pond, / And the straight, green rows of corn, with the wheat fields just beyond, / The sloping lawn on the right, that is always seeming to say / To the lake that lies below, "I will meet you just half way."

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A Lawyer's Romance is listed on Textopian as a short story by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, dated 1873 CE.

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Work type: Short story
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Date: 1873 CE
Language: English
Genres: Romance, Narrative Poetry, Tragedy, Elegiac, Nostalgic/Reflective
Length: 1,679 words
Structure: 1 section, 26 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)

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Genres

Romance — The work centers on a passionate love affair, with the narrator's romantic connection to Mable as the primary narrative focus, including declarations of love and physical affection.
Narrative Poetry — The piece tells a complete story with plot progression—meeting, courtship, passion, infidelity, and separation—presented in verse form with a clear narrative arc.
Tragedy — The romantic relationship concludes with devastating heartbreak and the death of the beloved, positioning the work as a tragic love story with irreversible loss.
Elegiac — The poem mourns a loss and reflects on the death of Mable, with an overall mournful and reflective tone characteristic of elegiac literature.