Occasional Poems | Page 9

again the old-remembered places,?Sit down beside your hearth once more and look in the dear old faces!
And thank you for the lessons your fifty years are teaching, For honest lives that louder speak than half our noisy preaching;
For your steady faith and courage in that dark and evil time, When the Golden Rule was treason, and to feed the hungry, crime;
For the poor slave's house of refuge when the hounds were on his track, And saint and sinner, church and state, joined hands to send him back.
Blessings upon you!--What you did for each sad, suffering one, So homeless, faint, and naked, unto our Lord was done!
Fair fall on Kennett's pleasant vales and Longwood's bowery ways The mellow sunset of your lives, friends of my early days.
May many more of quiet years be added to your sum,?And, late at last, in tenderest love, the beckoning angel come.
Dear hearts are here, dear hearts are there, alike below, above; Our friends are now in either world, and love is sure of love. 1874.
HYMN
FOR THE OPENING OF PLYMOUTH CHURCH, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA.
All things are Thine: no gift have we,?Lord of all gifts, to offer Thee;?And hence with grateful hearts to-day,?Thy own before Thy feet we lay.
Thy will was in the builders' thought;?Thy hand unseen amidst us wrought;?Through mortal motive, scheme and plan,?Thy wise eternal purpose ran.
No lack Thy perfect fulness knew;?For human needs and longings grew?This house of prayer, this home of rest,?In the fair garden of the West.
In weakness and in want we call?On Thee for whom the heavens are small;?Thy glory is Thy children's good,?Thy joy Thy tender Fatherhood.
O Father! deign these walls to bless,?Fill with Thy love their emptiness,?And let their door a gateway be?To lead us from ourselves to Thee!?1872.
LEXINGTON
1775.
No Berserk thirst of blood had they,?No battle-joy was theirs, who set?Against the alien bayonet?Their homespun breasts in that old day.
Their feet had trodden peaceful, ways;?They loved not strife, they dreaded pain;?They saw not, what to us is plain,?That God would make man's wrath his praise.
No seers were they, but simple men;?Its vast results the future hid?The meaning of the work they did?Was strange and dark and doubtful then.
Swift as their summons came they left?The plough mid-furrow standing still,?The half-ground corn grist in the mill,?The spade in earth, the axe in cleft.
They went where duty seemed to call,?They scarcely asked the reason why;?They only knew they could but die,?And death was not the worst of all!
Of man for man the sacrifice,?All that was theirs to give, they gave.?The flowers that blossomed from their grave?Have sown themselves beneath all skies.
Their death-shot shook the feudal tower,?And shattered slavery's chain as well;?On the sky's dome, as on a bell,?Its echo struck the world's great hour.
That fateful echo is not dumb?The nations listening to its sound?Wait, from a century's vantage-ground,?The holier triumphs yet to come,--
The bridal time of Law and Love,?The gladness of the world's release,?When, war-sick, at the feet of Peace?The hawk shall nestle with the dove!--
The golden age of brotherhood?Unknown to other rivalries?Than of the mild humanities,?And gracious interchange of good,
When closer strand shall lean to strand,?Till meet, beneath saluting flags,?The eagle of our mountain-crags,?The lion of our Motherland!?1875.
THE LIBRARY.
Sung at the opening of the Haverhill Library, November 11, 1875.
"Let there be light!" God spake of old,?And over chaos dark and cold,?And through the dead and formless frame?Of nature, life and order came.
Faint was the light at first that shone?On giant fern and mastodon,?On half-formed plant and beast of prey,?And man as rude and wild as they.
Age after age, like waves, o'erran?The earth, uplifting brute and man;?And mind, at length, in symbols dark?Its meanings traced on stone and bark.
On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll,?On plastic clay and leathern scroll,?Man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed,?And to! the Press was found at last!
Then dead souls woke; the thoughts of men?Whose bones were dust revived again;?The cloister's silence found a tongue,?Old prophets spake, old poets sung.
And here, to-day, the dead look down,?The kings of mind again we crown;?We hear the voices lost so long,?The sage's word, the sibyl's song.
Here Greek and Roman find themselves?Alive along these crowded shelves;?And Shakespeare treads again his stage,?And Chaucer paints anew his age.
As if some Pantheon's marbles broke?Their stony trance, and lived and spoke,?Life thrills along the alcoved hall,?The lords of thought await our call!
"I WAS A STRANGER, AND YE TOOK ME IN."
An incident in St. Augustine, Florida.
'Neath skies that winter never knew?The air was full of light and balm,?And warm and soft the Gulf wind blew?Through orange bloom and groves of palm.
A stranger from the frozen North,?Who sought the fount of health in vain,?Sank homeless on the alien earth,?And breathed the languid air with pain.
God's angel came! The tender shade?Of pity made her blue eye dim;?Against her woman's breast she laid?The drooping, fainting head of him.
She bore him