No wasted life, my God, shall mine now be,

Hours, days, and years filled up with toil for thee: I shall not live in vain!

VANITY.

Τα ἀληθῶς ἀγαθα οὐκ ἐστιν ἐν τῆ κατηραμένη γῆ .—ORIGEN.

NAY 'tis not that we fancied it,

This magic world of ours;

We thought its skies were only blue,
Its fields all sun and flowers.

Its streams all summer-bright and glad,
Its seas all smiles and calms,

Its path from youth to age, one long
Green avenue of palms.

But clouds came up with glooom and shade,

Our sky was overcast,

The hot mist threw its blight around,

Sunshine and flowers went past.

Hopes perished, that had hung like wreaths

Around youth's buoyant brow,

And joys, like withered autumn leaves,

Dropped from the shaken bough.

Yet from these clouds comes forth the light,— Light beaming from on high;

And from these faded flowers spring up

The flowers that can not die.

Far fairer is the land we seek,
A land without a tomb,
An everlasting resting-place,
A sure and quiet home.

Far sunnier than the hills of time

Are its eternal hills;

Far fresher than the rills of earth

Are its eternal rills.

No blight can fall upon its flowers,
No darkness fill its air,

It has a day forever bright,

For Christ, its sun, is there.

232

MACHPELAH.

O Sun of love and peace, arise,
Thy light upon us beam;
For all this life is but a sleep,

And all this world a dream.

MACHPELAH.

ONLY a tomb, no more!

A rock-hewn sepulchre,

And this, and this is all that's thine,
Fair Canaan's mighty heir!

Only a tomb, no more!

A future resting-place,

When God shall lay thee down, and bid
All thy long wanderings cease.

This cave and field,—no more,—
Canst thou thy dwelling call;

That land of thine,-plains, hills, woods,

streams,

The stranger has it all!

MACHPELAH.

Thy altar and thy tent

Are all that thou hast here:

With these content, thou passest on,
A homeless wanderer.

Thy life unrest and toil;
Thy course a pilgrimage;
Only in death thou goest down,
To claim thy heritage ;-

A heritage which death

Shall seal to thee for aye,

A resurrection-heritage

When all things pass away.

A home of endless peace,

Beyond these hills of strife;

When these old rocks give up their dead,

And death shall end in life.

A heritage of life,

Beyond this guarded gloom,

A kingdom, not a field or cave;
A city, not a tomb.

233

OLD WORDS.

*Απλα γὰρ ἐστι τῆς ἀληθειας ἔπη.ÆSCHYLUS.

WAS this earth sunnier in the days of old?
Or was it but the eye that looked on it,

That then was fresher, happier, in the youth

And manhood of our race? Were springs more bright And summers lovelier, lighted up by suns

Long set, -suns of a younger heaven than ours?

Was the air purer ere the heavy breath

Of

ages had gone to poison it?

Did the long gleam upon the ancient Nile
Blaze in a richer radiance to the noon,
When History's old father gazed upon it?
Or was the sunshine on the hills of Greece
Purer when Homer sang and Sappho wept :

Or was the brow of Lebanon more fair

With whiter snow-wreaths, when the kings of Tyre Builded their marble palaces beneath

The mighty shadows of its haughty peaks?