They are idols of hearts and of house- | My heart is the dungeon of darkness, holds, Where I shut them for breaking a rule: My frown is sufficient correction; MARY LOWE DICKINSON. IF WE HAD BUT A DAY. WE should fill the hours with the | We should guide our wayward o sweetest things, If we had but a day; wearied wills By the clearest light; We should drink alone at the purest We should keep our eyes on the springs In our upward way; heavenly hills, If they lay in sight; We should love with a lifetime's love We should trample the pride and the in an hour, If the hours were few; discontent Beneath our feet; We should rest, not for dreams, but We should take whatever a good for fresher power To be and to do. God sent, With a trust complete. We should waste no moments in We should be from our clamorous weak regret, If the day were but one; selves set free, To work or to pray, If what we remember and what we And to be what the Father would theme, immemorial Wheel, wheel through the sunshine, There must be odors round the pine, Wheel, wheel through the shadow; There must be balm of breathing kine, Somewhere down in the meadow. Must I choose? Then anchor me there Beyond the beckoning poplars, where The larch is snooding her flowery hair With wreaths of morning shadow. Among the thickest hazels of the brake shake Perchance some nightingale doth [song; His feathers, and the air is full of In those old days when I was young and strong, Beside the nursery. Along my life my length I lay, I fill to-morrow and yesterday, I am warm with the suns that have long since set, And rich as Chaucer's speech, and I am warm with the summers that are fair as Spenser's dream. HOME, WOunded. STAY wherever you will, not yet. And like one who dreams and dozes Softly afloat on a sunny sea, Two worlds are whispering over me, And there blows a wind of roses From the backward shore to the shore before, From the shore before to the back ward shore, And like two clouds that meet and pour The nevermore with the evermore Careless he greets her day by day, HEART-ORACLES. By the motes do we know where the sunbeam is slanting; Through the hindering stones, speaks the soul of the brook; Past the rustle of leaves we press into the stillness; Through darkness and void to the Pleiads we look; One bird-note at dawn with the nightsilence o'er us, Begins all the morning's munificent chorus. Through sorrow come glimpses of infinite gladness; Through grand discontent mounts the spirit of youth; Loneliness foldeth a wonderful loving; The breakers of Doubt lead the great tide of Truth: And dread and grief-haunted the shadowy portal That shuts from our vision the splendor immortal. THE CHILD AND THE SEA. ONE summer day, when birds flew high, I saw a child step into the sea; It glowed and sparkled at her touch And softly plashed about her knee. It held her lightly with its strength, It kissed and kissed her silken hair; It swayed with tenderness to know A little child was in its care. She, gleeful, dipped her pretty arms, And caught the sparkles in her hands; I heard her laughter, as she soon Came skipping up the sunny sands. THEY wait all day unseen by us, unfelt; Patient they bide behind the day's full glare; And we who watched the dawn when they were there, Thought we had seen them in the daylight melt, While the slow sun upon the earthline knelt. Because the teeming sky seemed void and bare, When we explored it through the dazzled air, We had no thought that there all day they dwelt. Yet were they over us, alive and true. In the vast shades far up above the blue, The brooding shades beyond our daylight ken Serene and patient in their conscious light Ready to sparkle for our joy again,→ The eternal jewels of the shortlived night. |