His warning finger out to be thy guide.
Thou art the nurseling now; he watches thee
Slow learning, one by one, the secret things
Which are to him used sights of every day;
He smiles to see thy wondering glances con
The grass and pebbles of the spirit-world,
To thee miraculous; and he will teach
Thy knees their due observances of prayer.
Children are God's apostles, day by day
Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace;
Nor hath thy babe his mission left undone.
To me, at least, his going hence hath given
Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies,
And opened a new fountain in my heart
For thee, my friend, and all: and oh, if Death
More near approaches meditates, and clasps
Even now some dearer, more reluctant hand,
God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may see
That 'tis thine angel, who, with loving haste,
Unto the service of the inner shrine
Doth waken thy beloved with a kiss!
SAID Christ our Lord, "I will go and see
How the men, my brethren, believe in me."
He passed not again through the gate of birth,
But made himself known to the children of earth.
Then said the chief priests, and rulers, and kings,
"Behold now the Giver of all good things;
Go to, let us welcome with pomp and state
Him who alone is mighty and great.'
With carpets of gold the ground they spread
Wherever the Son of Man should tread,
And in palace-chambers lofty and rare
They lodged him, and served him with kingly fare.
Great organs surged through arches dim.
Their jubilant floods in praise of him,
And in church and palace and judgment-hall
He saw his image high over all.
But still, wherever his steps they led,
The Lord in sorrow bent down his head,
And from under the heavy foundation-stones
The Son of Mary heard bitter groans.
And in church and palace and judgment-hall
He marked great fissures that rent the wall,
And opened wider and yet more wide
As the living foundation heaved and sighed.
"Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then,
On the bodies and souls of living men?
And think ye that building shall endure
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?
"With gates of silver and bars of gold
Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father's fold:
I have heard the dropping of their tears
In heaven, these eighteen-hundred years.'
"O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, through all our land.
“Our task is hard,-with sword and flame
To hold thy earth for ever the same,
And with sharp crooks of steel to keep
Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep."
Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.
These set he in the midst of them;
And as they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear of defilement, "Lo here," said he,
"The images ye have made of me!"
WE too have autumns, when our leaves
Drop loosely through the dampened air,
When all our good seems bound in sheaves,
And we stand reaped and bare.
Our seasons have no fixed returns,
Without our will they come and go;
At noon our sudden summer burns,
Ere sunset all is snow.
But each day brings less summer cheer,
Crimps more our ineffectual spring,
And something earlier every year
Our singing birds take wing.
As less the olden glow abides,
And less the chillier heart aspires,
With drift-wood beached in past spring-tides We light our sullen fires.
By the pinched rushlight's starving beam We cower and strain our wasted sight, To stitch youth's shroud up, seam by seam, In the long arctic night.
It was not so-we once were young-
When Spring, to womanly Summer turning,
Her dew-drops on each grass-blade strung,
In the red sunrise burning.
We trusted then, aspired, believed
That earth could be remade to-morrow;—
Ah why be ever undeceived?
Why give up faith for sorrow?
O thou whose days are yet all spring,
Faith, blighted once, is past retrieving;
Experience is a dumb, dead thing;
The victory's in believing.
BOWING thyself in dust before a Book,
And thinking the great God is thine alone,
O rash iconoclast, thou wilt not brook
What gods the heathen carves in wood and stone;
As if the Shepherd who from outer cold
Leads all his shivering lambs to one sure fold
Were careful for the fashion of his crook.
There is no broken reed so poor and base,
No rush, the bending tilt of swamp-fly blue,
But he therewith the ravening wolf can chase,
And guide his flock to springs and pastures new;
Through ways unlooked for, and through many
lands,
Far from the rich folds built with human hands,
The gracious footprints of his love I trace.
And what art thou, own brother of the clod,
That from his hand the crook wouldst snatch away,
And shake instead thy dry and sapless rod,
To scare the sheep out of the wholesome day?
Yea, what art thou, blind, unconverted Jew,
That with thy idol-volume's covers two
Wouldst make a jail to coop the living God?
Thou hear'st not well the mountain organ-strains
By prophet ears from Hor and Sinai caught,
Thinking the cisterns of those Hebrew brains
Drew dry the springs of the All-knower's thought;
Nor shall thy lips be touched with living fire,
Who blow'st old altar-coals with sole desire
To weld anew the spirit's broken chains.
God is not dumb, that he should speak no more;
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness
And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor.
There towers the mountain of the Voice no less,
Which whoso seeks shall find; but he who bends,
Intent on manna still and mortal ends,
Sees it not, neither hears its thundered lore.
Slowly the Bible of the race is writ,
And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone;
Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it,
Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan.
While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud,
While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud,
Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit.
THROUGH Suffering and sorrow thou hast passed ⚫
To show us what a woman true may be.
They have not taken sympathy from thee,
Nor made thee any other than thou wast;
Save as some tree which, in a sudden blast,
Sheddeth those blossoms that are weakly grown
Upon the air, but keepeth every one
Whose strength gives warrant of good fruit at last,
So thou hast shed some blooms of gaiety,
But never one of steadfast cheerfulness;
Nor hath thy knowledge of adversity
Robbed thee of any faith in happiness,
But rather cleared thine inner eyes to see
How many simple ways there are to bless.
OUR love is not a fading earthly flower:
Its winged seed dropped down from Paradise,
And, nursed by day and night, by sun and shower,
Doth momently to fresher beauty rise.
To us the leafless autumn is not bare,
Nor winter's rattling boughs lack lusty green:
Our summer hearts make summer's fulness where
No leaf or bud or blossom may be seen:
For nature's life in love's deep life doth lie,
Love, whose forgetfulness is beauty's death,
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