Works

1.

FROM thine, as then, the healing virtue goes
Into our hearts--that is the Father's plan.
From heart to heart it sinks, it steals, it flows,
From these that know thee still infecting those....

1.

THE song birds that come to me night and morn,
Fly oft away and vanish if I sleep,
Nor to my fowling-net will one return:
Is the thing ever ours we cannot keep?--...

1.

WHAT though my words glance sideways from the thing
Which I would utter in thine ear, my sire!
Truth in the inward parts thou dost desire--
Wise hunger, not a fitness fine of speech:...

1.

THOU art of this world, Christ. Thou know'st it all;
Thou know'st our evens, our morns, our red and gray;
How moons, and hearts, and seasons rise and fall;
How we grow weary plodding on the way;...

1.

REMEMBER, Lord, thou hast not made me good.
Or if thou didst, it was so long ago
I have forgotten--and never understood,
I humbly think. At best it was a crude,...

1.

WE are a shadow and a shining, we!
One moment nothing seems but what we see,
Nor aught to rule but common circumstance--
Nought is to seek but praise, to shun but chance;...

FROM SCHILLER.

"Which of you, knight or squire, will dare
Plunge into yonder gulf?
A golden beaker I fling in it--there!
The black mouth swallows it like a wolf!...

I.

I say! hey! cousin there! I mustn't call you brother!
Yet you have a tail behind, and I have another!
You pull, and I pull, though we don't pull together:...

Down a warm alley, early in the year,
Among the woods, with all the sunshine in
And all the winds outside it, I begin
To think that something gracious will appear,
If anything of grace inhabit here,...

A little bird sat on the edge of her nest;
Her yellow-beaks slept as sound as tops;
Day-long she had worked almost without rest,
And had filled every one of their gibbous crops;...

Where went the feet that hitherto have come?
Here yawns no gulf to quench the flowing past!
With lengthening pauses broke, the path grows dumb;
The grass floats in; the gazer stands aghast.
...

'Tis we, not in thine arms, who weep and pray;
The children in thy bosom laugh and play.

Of old, with goodwill from the skies--
God's message to them given--
The angels came, a glad surprise,
And went again to heaven.

But now the angels are grown rare,
Needed no more as then;...

A harebell hung her wilful head:
"I am tired, so tired! I wish I was dead."

She hung her head in the mossy dell:
"If all were over, then all were well!"

The Wind he heard, and was pitiful,...

There was a girl that lost things--
Nor only from her hand;
She lost, indeed--why, most things,
As if they had been sand!

She said, "But I must use them,
And can't look after all!...

To give a thing and take again
Is counted meanness among men;
To take away what once is given
Cannot then be the way of heaven!

But human hearts are crumbly stuff,
And never, never love enough,...

In God alone, the perfect end,
Wilt thou find thyself or friend.

From off the earth the vapours curled,
Went up to meet their joy;
The boy awoke, and all the world
Was waiting for the boy!

The sky, the water, the wide earth
Was full of windy play--...

Had I the grace to win the grace
Of some old man in lore complete,
My face would worship at his face,
And I sit lowly at his feet.

Had I the grace to win the grace
Of childhood, loving shy, apart,...

Suggested by a drawing of Thomas Moran, the American painter.

This must be the very night!
The moon knows it!--and the trees!
They stand straight upright,
Each a sentinel drawn up,...