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 We see but dimly through the mists and vapors 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, And Christ himself doth rule. 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, 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; Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme. Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best; For the structure that we raise, Our to-days and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these; Leave no yawning gaps between; Think not, because no man sees, Such things will remain unseen. 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, Else our lives are incomplete, Stumble as they seek to climb. Build to-day, then, strong and sure, Thus alone can we attain To those turrets, where the eye SAND OF THE DESERT IN AN HOURGLASS. A HANDFUL of red sand, from the hot clime Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, 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 |