The blow most dreaded falls to break
From off our limbs a chain;
And wrongs of man to man but make
The love of God more plain.
As through the shadowy lens of even
The eye looks farthest into heaven
On gleams of star and depths of blue
The glaring sunshine never knew!
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When the reaper’s task was ended, and the summer wearing late,
Dropping down the river-harbor in the shallop ‘Watch and Wait.’Pleasantly lay the clearings in the mellow summer-morn,With the newly planted orchards dropping their fruits first-born,And the home-roofs like brown islands amid a sea of corn.Broad meadows reached out ‘seaward the tided creeks between,And hills rolled wave-like inland, with oaks and walnuts green;-A fairer home, a-goodlier…
She came and stood in the Old South Church,
With a look the old-time sibyls wore,Half-crazed and half-divine.Save the mournful sackcloth about her wound,Unclothed as the primal mother,With limbs that trembled and eyes that blazedWith a fire she dare not smother.Loose on her shoulders fell her hair,With sprinkled ashes gray;She stood in the broad aisle strange and weirdAs a soul at the judgment day.And…
WITH A COPY OF WOOLMAN’S JOURNAL.
Shading o’er thy dreamy eye,Floating on thy thoughtful foreheadCloud wreaths of its sky.Youthful years and maiden beauty,Joy with them should still abide,–Instinct take the place of Duty,Love, not Reason, guide.Ever in the New rejoicing,Kindly beckoning back the Old,Turning, with the gift of Midas,All things into gold.And the passing shades of sadnessWearing even a welcome guise,As,…
What flecks the outer gray beyond
The white flash of a sea-bird’s wing,Or gleam of slanting sail?Let young eyes watch from Neck and Point,And sea-worn elders pray,–The ghost of what was once a shipIs sailing up the bay.From gray sea-fog, from icy drift,From peril and from pain,The home-bound fisher greets thy lights,O hundred-harbored Maine!But many a keel shall seaward turn,And many…
John Pierpont, the eloquent preacher and poet of Boston.
With which my childhood heard that lay of thine,Which, like an echo of the song divineAt Bethlehem breathed above the Holy Boy,Bore to my ear the Airs of Palestine,–Not to the poet, but the man I bringIn friendship’s fearless trust my offeringHow much it lacks I feel, and thou wilt see,Yet well I know that…
From pain and peril, by land and main,
And like one from the dead, the threshold cross’dOf his wondering home, that had mourned him lost.Where he sat once more with his kith and kin,And welcomed his neighbors thronging in.But when morning came he called for his spade.‘I must pay my debt to the Lord,’ he said.‘Why dig you here?’ asked the passer-by;‘Is there…