Occasional Poems | Page 3

you gather again;
And, with hearts warmer grown as
your heads grow more cool, Play over the old game of going to school.
All your strifes and vexations, your whims and complaints,
(You
were not saints yourselves, if the children of saints!) All your petty
self-seekings and rivalries done,
Round the dear Alma Mater your

hearts beat as one!
How widely soe'er you have strayed from the fold,
Though your
"thee" has grown "you," and your drab blue and gold, To the old
friendly speech and the garb's sober form,
Like the heart of Argyle to
the tartan, you warm.
But, the first greetings over, you glance round the hall;
Your hearts
call the roll, but they answer not all
Through the turf green above
them the dead cannot hear;
Name by name, in the silence, falls sad as
a tear!
In love, let us trust, they were summoned so soon
rom the morning of
life, while we toil through its noon;
They were frail like ourselves,
they had needs like our own, And they rest as we rest in God's mercy
alone.
Unchanged by our changes of spirit and frame,
Past, now, and
henceforward the Lord is the same;
Though we sink in the darkness,
His arms break our fall,
And in death as in life, He is Father of all!
We are older: our footsteps, so light in the play
Of the far-away
school-time, move slower to-day;--
Here a beard touched with frost,
there a bald, shining crown, And beneath the cap's border gray mingles
with brown.
But faith should be cheerful, and trust should be glad,
And our follies
and sins, not our years, make us sad.
Should the heart closer shut as
the bonnet grows prim,
And the face grow in length as the hat grows
in brim?
Life is brief, duty grave; but, with rain-folded wings,
Of yesterday's
sunshine the grateful heart sings;
And we, of all others, have reason
to pay
The tribute of thanks, and rejoice on our way;
For the counsels that turned from the follies of youth;
For the beauty

of patience, the whiteness of truth;
For the wounds of rebuke, when
love tempered its edge;
For the household's restraint, and the
discipline's hedge;
For the lessons of kindness vouchsafed to the least
Of the creatures of
God, whether human or beast,
Bringing hope to the poor, lending
strength to the frail,
In the lanes of the city, the slave-hut, and jail;
For a womanhood higher and holier, by all
Her knowledge of good,
than was Eve ere her fall,--
Whose task-work of duty moves lightly as
play,
Serene as the moonlight and warm as the day;
And, yet more, for the faith which embraces the whole,
Of the creeds
of the ages the life and the soul,
Wherein letter and spirit the same
channel run,
And man has not severed what God has made one!
For a sense of the Goodness revealed everywhere,
As sunshine
impartial, and free as the air;
For a trust in humanity, Heathen or Jew,

And a hope for all darkness the Light shineth through.
Who scoffs at our birthright?--the words of the seers,
And the songs
of the bards in the twilight of years,
All the foregleams of wisdom in
santon and sage,
In prophet and priest, are our true heritage.
The Word which the reason of Plato discerned;
The truth, as whose
symbol the Mithra-fire burned;
The soul of the world which the Stoic
but guessed,
In the Light Universal the Quaker confessed!
No honors of war to our worthies belong;
Their plain stem of life
never flowered into song;
But the fountains they opened still gush by
the way,
And the world for their healing is better to-day.
He who lies where the minster's groined arches curve down
To the
tomb-crowded transept of England's renown,
The glorious essayist,
by genius enthroned,
Whose pen as a sceptre the Muses all owned,--

Who through the world's pantheon walked in his pride,
Setting new
statues up, thrusting old ones aside,
And in fiction the pencils of
history dipped,
To gild o'er or blacken each saint in his crypt,--
How vainly he labored to sully with blame
The white bust of Penn, in
the niche of his fame!
Self-will is self-wounding, perversity blind

On himself fell the stain for the Quaker designed!
For the sake of his true-hearted father before him;
For the sake of the
dear Quaker mother that bore him;
For the sake of his gifts, and the
works that outlive him,
And his brave words for freedom, we freely
forgive him!
There are those who take note that our numbers are small,-- New
Gibbons who write our decline and our fall;
But the Lord of the
seed-field takes care of His own,
And the world shall yet reap what
our sowers have sown.
The last of the sect to his fathers may go,
Leaving only his coat for
some Barnum to show;
But the truth will outlive him, and broaden
with years,
Till the false dies away, and the wrong disappears.
Nothing fails of its end. Out of sight sinks the stone,
In the deep sea
of time, but the