BY THE FIRESIDE RESIGNATION THERE is no flock, however watched and tended, 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 vapours; 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, She is not dead,--the child of our affection,- 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 Year after year her tender steps pursuing, Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken, May reach her where she lives. Not as a child shall we again behold her; In our embraces we again enfold her, But a fair maiden, in her Father's mansion, And beautiful with all the soul's expansion And though at times, impetuous with emotion The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean, 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 BUILDERS ALL are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time ; Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best; And what seems but idle show, Strengthens and supports the rest. For the structure that we raise, Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these ; In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care, Each minute and unseen part; For the Gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen; Make the house, where Gods may dwell, Beautiful, entire, and clean. Else our lives are incomplete, Build to-day, then, strong and sure, Shall to-morrow find its place. Thus alone can we attain To those turrets, where the eye Sees the world as one vast plain, And one boundless reach of sky. SAND OF THE DESERT IN AN HOUR-GLASS A HANDFUL of red sand, from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought. How many weary centuries has it been Perhaps the camels of the Ishmaelite When into Egypt from the patriarch's sight Perhaps the feet of Moses, burnt and bare, Or Pharaoh's flashing wheels into the air Or Mary, with the Christ of Nazareth Whose pilgrimage of hope and love and faith Or anchorites beneath Engaddi's palms Or caravans, that from Bassora's gate Or Mecca's pilgrims, confident of Fate, These have passed over it, or may have passed! And as I gaze, these narrow walls expand ;- Stretches the desert with its shifting sand, And borne aloft by the sustaining blast, And onward, and across the setting sun, The column and its broader shadow run, The vision vanishes! These walls again Shut out the hot immeasurable plain, PEGASUS IN POUND ONCE into a quiet village, Without haste and without heed, In the golden prime of morning, Strayed the poet's wingèd steed. It was Autumn, and incessant Piped the quails from shocks and sheaves, And, like living coals, the apples Burned among the withering leaves. |