Explore "Only a Line" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Only a line in the paper, / That somebody read aloud, / At a table of languid boarders, / To the dull indifferent crowd.
Markets and deaths -- and a marriage: / And the reader read them all. / How could he know a hope died then, / And was wrapped in a funeral pall.
Only a line in the paper, / Read in a casual way, / But the glow went out of one young life, / And left it cold and grey.
Colder than bleak December, / Greyer than walls of rock, / But the reader paused, and the room grew full / Of laughter and idle talk.
If one slipped off to her chamber, / Why, who could dream or know, / That one brief line in the paper / Had sent her away with her woe?
Away into lonely sorrow, / To bitter and blinding tears; / Only a line in the paper, / But it meant such desolate years.