For us who strive to follow. May I reach So shall I join the choir invisible, Whose music is the gladness of the world. George Eliot. Absence. WHAT shall I do with all the days and hours I'll tell thee: for thy sake, I will lay hold For thee, I will arouse my thoughts to try All heavenward flights, all high and holy strains; For thy dear sake, I will walk patiently Through these long hours, nor call their minutes pains. I will this weary blank of absence make To follow excellence, and to o'ertake More good than I have won since yet I live. So may this darksome time build up in me And thy dear thought an influence divine. Frances Anne Kemble. The Reaper and the Flowers. THERE is a Reaper, whose name is Death, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, "Shall I have naught that is fair?" saith he; "Have naught but the bearded grain ? Though the breath of these flowers is sweet to me, I will give them all back again." He gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes, He kissed their drooping leaves; It was for the Lord of Paradise He bound them in his sheaves. "My Lord has need of these flowerets gay," And the mother gave, in tears and pain, She knew she should find them all again O, not in cruelty, not in wrath, The Reaper came that day; 'Twas an angel visited the green earth, And took the flowers away. Longfellow. THERE is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb is there! There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, The air is full of farewells to the dying, The heart of Rachel for her children crying, Let us be patient! These severe afflictions But oftentimes celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise. We see but dimly through the mists and vapors; Amid these earthly damps, What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps. There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death. She is not dead, the child of our affection,— But gone unto that school Where she no longer needs our poor protection, In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, Day after day we think what she is doing In those bright realms of air; Year after year, her tender steps pursuing, Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken, Not as a child shall we again behold her; For, when with raptures wild In our embraces we again enfold her, She will not be a child, But a fair maiden, in her Father's mansion, And beautiful with all the soul's expansion And though at times, impetuous with emotion And anguish long suppressed, The swelling heart heaves, moaning like the ocean That cannot be at rest, We will be patient, and assuage the feeling We may not wholly stay; By silence sanctifying, not concealing, The grief that must have way. The Eternal Goodness. WITHIN the maddening maze of things, I long for household voices gone, I know not what the future hath Assured alone that life and death His mercy underlies. Longfellow. And if my heart and flesh are weak The bruised reed he will not break, And so, beside the silent sea No harm from him can come to me I know not where his islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift From " Snow-Bound." THE dear home faces whereupon No step is on the conscious floor! Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress-trees! Whittier |