Poems of Sentiment | Page 3

wave,
It roamed in the forest, it
rose in the grave,
It took on strange garbs for long aeons of years,

And now in the soul of yourself it appears.
From body to body your spirit speeds on;
It seeks a new form when
the old one is gone;
And the form that it finds is the fabric you
wrought
On the loom of the mind, with the fibre of thought.
As dew is drawn upward, in rain to descend,
Your thoughts drift
away and in destiny blend.
You cannot escape them; or petty, or great,

Or evil, or noble, they fashion your fate.
Somewhere on some planet, sometime and somehow,
Your life will
reflect all the thoughts of your now.
The law is unerring; 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