Poems of Sentiment | Page 3

no blood can atone;?The structure you rear you must live in alone.
From cycle to cycle, through time and through space,?Your lives with your longings will ever keep pace.?And all that you ask for, and all you desire,?Must come at your bidding, as flames out of fire.
Once list to that voice and all tumult is done,?Your life is the life of the Infinite One;?In the hurrying race you are conscious of pause,?With love for the purpose and love for the cause.
You are your own devil, you are your own God,?You fashioned the paths that your footsteps have trod,?And no one can save you from error or sin,?Until you shall hark to the Spirit within.
LOVE, TIME, AND WILL
A soul immortal, Time, God everywhere,?Without, within--how can a heart despair,?Or talk of failure, obstacles, and doubt??(What proofs of God? The little seeds that sprout,?Life, and the solar system, and their laws.?Nature? Ah, yes; but what was Nature's cause?)
All mighty words are short: God, life, and death,?War, peace, and truth, are uttered in a breath.?And briefly said are love, and will, and time;?Yet in them lies a majesty sublime.
Love is the vast constructive power of space;?Time is the hour which calls it into place;?Will is the means of using time and love,?And bringing forth the heart's desires thereof.
The way is love, the time is now, and will?The patient method. Let this knowledge fill?Thy consciousness, and fate and circumstance,?Environment, and all the ills of chance?Must yield before the concentrated might?Of those three words, as shadows yield to light.
Go, charge thyself with love; be infinite?And opulent with thy large use of it:?'Tis from free sowing that full harvest springs;?Love God and life and all created things.
Learn time's great value; to this mandate bow,?The hour of opportunity is Now,?And from thy will, as from a well-strung bow,?Let the swift arrows of thy wishes go.?Though sent into the distance and the dark,?The dawn shall prove thy arrows hit the mark.
THE TWO AGES
On great cathedral window I have seen?A summer sunset swoon and sink away,?Lost in the splendours of immortal art.?Angels and saints and all the heavenly hosts,?With smiles undimmed by half a thousand years,?From wall and niche have met my lifted gaze.?Sculpture and carving and illumined page,?And the fair, lofty dreams of architects,?That speak of beauty to the centuries -?All these have fed me with divine repasts.?Yet in my mouth is left a bitter taste,?The taste of blood that stained that age of art.
Those glorious windows shine upon the black?And hideous structure of the guillotine;?Beside the haloed countenance of saints?There hangs the multiple and knotted lash.?The Christ of love, benign and beautiful,?Looks at the torture-rack, by hate conceived?And bigotry sustained. The prison cell,?With blood-stained walls, where starving men went mad,?Lies under turrets matchless in their grace.
God, what an age! How was it that You let?Colossal genius and colossal crime?Walk for a hundred years across the earth,?Like giant twins? How was it then that men,?Conceiving such vast beauty for the world,?And such large hopes of heaven, could entertain?Such hellish projects for their fellow-men??How could the hand that, with consummate skill?And loving patience, limned the luminous page,?Drop pen and brush, and seize the branding-rod,?To scourge a brother for his differing faith?
Not great this age in beauty or in art;?Nothing is wrought to-day that shall endure,?For earth's adornment, through long centuries?Not ours the fervid worship of a God?That wastes its splendid opulence on glass,?Leaving but hate, to give it mortal kin.?Yet great this age: its mighty work is man?Knowing himself, the universal life.?And great our faith, which shows itself in works?For human freedom and for racial good.?The true religion lies in being kind.?No age is greater than its faith is broad.?Through liberty and love men climb to God.
COULEUR DE ROSE
I want more lives in which to love
This world so full of beauty,?I want more days to use the ways
I know of doing duty;?I ask no greater joy than this
(So much I am life's lover),?When I reach age to turn the page
And read the story over.?(O love, stay near!)
O rapturous promise of the Spring!
O June fulfilling after!?If Autumns sigh, when Summers die,
'Tis drowned in Winter's laughter.?O maiden dawns, O wifely noons,
O siren sweet, sweet nights,?I'd want no heaven could earth be given
Again with its delights?(If love stayed near).
There are such glories for the eye,
Such pleasures for the ear,?The senses reel with all they feel
And see and taste and hear;?There are such ways of doing good,
Such ways of being kind,?And bread that's cast on waters fast
Comes home again, I find.?(O love, stay near.)
There are such royal souls to know,
There is so much to learn,?While secrets rest in Nature's breast
And unnamed stars still burn.?God toiled six days to make this earth,
I think the good folks say -?Six lives we need to give full meed
Of praise--one for each day?(If love stay near).
But oh! if love fled