Works

O Holy Father! just and true
Are all Thy works and words and ways,
And unto Thee alone are due
Thanksgiving and eternal praise!
As children of Thy gracious care,
We veil the eye, we bend the knee,...

1.
The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,
Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries
From the broad moonlight of the sky,
Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes, -...

Oh, lost, forever lost--no more
Shall Vesper light our dewy way
Along the rocks of Crissa's shore,
To hymn the fading fires of day;
No more to Tempe's distant vale
In holy musings shall we roam,...

The careful text-books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,...

Artemis! thou fairest
Of the maids that be
In divine Olympus,
Hail! Hail to thee!
To thee I bring this woven weed
Culled for thee from a virgin mead,...

(During the Session in Rome of the Ecumenical Council)


In the grey beginning of years, in the twilight of things that began,
The word of the earth in the ears of the world, was it God? was it man?...

1.
From the forests and highlands
We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb
Listening to my sweet pipings.
The wind in the reeds and the rushes,...

Encompassed by the psalm of hill and stream,
By hymns august with their majestic theme,
Here in the evening of exalted days
To Thee, our Friend, we bow with breath of praise.
...

Thine are all the gifts, O God!
Thine the broken bread;
Let the naked feet be shod,
And the starving fed.

Let Thy children, by Thy grace,
Give as they abound,...

Not in the solitude
Alone may man commune with Heaven, or see
Only in savage wood
And sunny vale, the present Deity;
Or only hear his voice
Where the winds whisper and the waves rejoice.
...

My eyes have seen another spring
In floral beauty rise,
And happy birds on gladsome wing
Flit through the azure skies.
Though sickness bowed my feeble frame
Through winter's cheerless hours,...

Kloster Kedar, Ephrata, Pennsylvania (1738)

Sister Maria Christina sings:


Wake, sisters, wake! the day-star shines;
Above Ephrata's eastern pines
The dawn is breaking, cool and calm....

When the dying flame of day
Through the chancel shot its ray,
Far the glimmering tapers shed
Faint light on the cowled head;
And the censer burning swung,
Where, before the altar, hung...

When the dying flame of day
Through the chancel shot its ray,
Far the glimmering tapers shed
Faint light on the cowled head;
And the censer burning swung,
Where, before the altar, hung...

Arm me, Lord, my strength redouble,
Heaven open, heed my trouble!
God, if my cause Thine shall be,
Grant a day of victory!
Fell all Thy foes now!
Fell all Thy foes now!...

By the bodies and minds and souls that rot in a common sty
In the city's offal-holes, where the dregs of its horrors lie;
By the prayers that bubble out, but never ascend to God,...

They were three old men with hoary hair
And beards of wintry gray,
And they digged a grave in the yellow soil,
And they crooned this song as they plied their toil,
In the fading light of day:
...

Oh, long had we paltered
With bridle and girth
Ere those horses were haltered
That gave us the Earth,

Ere the Flame and the Fountain,
The Spark and the Wheel,
Sank Ocean and Mountain...

Hear, Father, hear thy faint afflicted flock
Cry to thee, from the desert and the rock;
While those, who seek to slay thy children, hold
Blasphemous worship under roofs of gold;...

O Love Divine, that stooped to share
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
On Thee we cast each earth-born care,
We smile at pain while Thou art near!

Though long the weary way we tread,...