Mountain idylls, and Other Poems | Page 7

strewn on its trackless path;?So our lives with resistless fury,?Insensibly and unknown,?With a restless vacillation?By the winds of fate are blown;
But an All-Wise Hand?May have changed the sand,?For a purpose of His own.
As the troubled and turbulent waters,?As the waves of the angry main,?Respond with their undulations?To the breath of the hurricane;?So our lives on Time's boundless ocean?Unwittingly toss and roll,?And unconsciously drift with the current?Which evades our assumed control;
But a Hand of love,?From the skies above,?May have guided us past a shoal.
Ephemeral, mobile, and fleeting,?Our delible paths we tread;?And fade as the crimson sunset,?When the heavens are tinged with red;?As the gorgeously tinted rainbow?Retains not its varied dyes,?We change, with the constant mutation,?Of desert, of sea, and skies;
But the Hand which made,?Knows each transient shade,?Which passes before the eyes.
[Illustration: "Which smile from their heights on the town of Ouray."
OURAY, COLORADO.]
Missed.
Pity the child who never feels?A mother's fond caress;?That childish smile a void conceals?Of aching loneliness.
Pity the heart which loves in vain,?What balm or mystic spell?Can soothe that bosom's secret pain,?The pain it may not tell?
Pity those missed by Cupid's darts,?For 'twas ordained for such,?Who love at random, but whose hearts?Feel no responsive touch.
If I Have Lived Before.
If I have lived before, some evidence?Should that existence to the present bind;?Some innate inkling of experience?Should still imbue and permeate the mind,?If we, progressing, pass from state to state,?Or retrograde, as turns the wheel of fate.
If I have lived before, and could my eyes?But view the scenes wherein that life was spent,?Or even for an instant recognize?The climes, conditions and environment?Beloved by them in that pre-natal span,?Though past and future both be sealed to man;
Or, if perchance, kind memory should ope'?Her floodgates, with fond recollection fraught,?'Twould then renew the dormant fires of hope,?Now smothered out by speculative thought;?'Twould then rekindle faith within a breast,?Where doubt is now the sole remaining guest.
The Darker Side.
They say that all nature is smiling and gay,?And the birds the most happy of all,?But the sparrow, pursued by the sparrowhawk,?Savors more of the wormwood and gall.
They say that all nature is smiling and gay,?But the groan may dissemble the laugh;?E'en now from the meadow is wafted the sound?Of a bovine bewailing her calf.
They say that all nature is smiling and gay,?But the moss often covers the rock;?Every animal form is beset by a foe,?For the wolf always follows the flock.
For the animal holds all inferior flesh?As its just and legitimate prey;?Every scream of the eagle a panic creates?As the weaker things scamper away.
They say that all nature is smiling and gay,?But the smiles are all needed to sweeten?The struggle we see so incessantly waged?To eat, and avoid being eaten.
And men, with their genial competitive ways?Present no decided improvements,?For their personal gain they will sacrifice all?Who may stand in the way of their movements.
The Miner.
Clink! Clink! Clink!?The song of the hammer and drill!?At the sound of the whistle so shrill and clear,?He must leave the wife and the children dear,?In his cabin upon the hill.
Clink! Clink! Clink!?But the arms that deliver the sturdy stroke,?Ere the shift is done, may be crushed or broke,?Or the life may succumb to the gas and smoke,?Which the underground caverns fill.
Clink! Clink! Clink!?The song of the hammer and drill!?As he toils in the shaft, in the stope or raise,?'Mid dangers which lurk, but elude the gaze,?His nerves with no terrors thrill.
Clink! Clink! Clink!?For the heart of the miner is strong and brave;?Though the rocks may fall, and the shaft may cave?And become his dungeon, if not his grave,?He braves every thought of ill.
Clink! Clink! Clink!?The song of the hammer and drill!?But the heart which is beating in unison?With the steady stroke, e'er the shift is done,?May be cold and forever still.
Clink! Clink! Clink!?He may reap the harvest of danger sowed,?The hole which he drills he may never load,?For the powder may e'en in his hand explode,?To mangle, if not to kill.
Clink! Clink! Clink!?The song of the hammer and drill!?Facing dangers more grim than the cannon's mouth;?Breathing poisons more foul than the swamps of the south?In their tropical fens distill.
Clink! Clink! Clink!?Thus the battle he fights for his daily bread;?Thus our gold and our silver, our iron and lead,?Cost us lives, as true as our blood is red,?And probably always will.
Life's Undercurrent.
Within the precincts of a hospital,?I wandered in a sympathetic mood;?Where face to face with wormwood and with gall,?With wrecks of pain and stern vicissitude,?The eye unused to human misery?Might view life's undercurrent vividly.
My gaze soon rested on the stricken form?Of one succumbing to the fever's drouth,?With throbbing brow intolerably warm,?With wasted lips and mute appealing mouth;?And when I watched that prostrate figure there?I thought that fate must be the worst to bear.
I next beheld a thin but patient face,?Aged by the constant twinge of hopeless pain,?Wheeled in an easy chair from place to