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at anchor chain;?Their errand done, their impulse spent,?Chained by an alien element,?With sails unset they idly lie,?Though morning beckons brave and nigh;?Like wounded birds, their flight denied,?They lie, and long and wait the tide.
About their keels, within the net?Of tough grass fibres green and wet,?A myriad thirsty creatures, pent?In sorrowful imprisonment,?Await the beat, distinct and sweet,?Of the white waves' returning feet.?My soul their vigil joins, and shares?A nobler discontent than theirs;?Athirst like them, I patiently?Sit listening beside the sea,?And still the waters outward glide:?When is the turning of the tide?
Come, pulse of God; come, heavenly thrill!?We wait thy coming,--and we will.?The world is vast, and very far?Its utmost verge and boundaries are;?But thou hast kept thy word to-day?In India and in dim Cathay,?And the same mighty care shall reach?Each humblest rock-pool of this beach.?The gasping fish, the stranded keel,?This dull dry soul of mine, shall feel?Thy freshening touch, and, satisfied,?Shall drink the fulness of the tide.
FLOOD-TIDE.
All night the thirsty beach has listening lain,
With patience dumb,?Counting the slow, sad moments of her pain;
Now morn has come,?And with the morn the punctual tide again.
I hear the white battalions down the bay
Charge with a cheer;?The sun's gold lances prick them on their way,--
They plunge, they rear,--?Foam-plumed and snowy-pennoned, they are here!
The roused shore, her bright hair backward blown,
Stands on the verge?And waves a smiling welcome, beckoning on
The flying surge,?While round her feet, like doves, the billows crowd and urge.
Her glad lips quaff the salt, familiar wine;
Her spent urns fill;?All hungering creatures know the sound, the sign,--
Quiver and thrill,?With glad expectance crowd and banquet at their will.
I, too, the rapt contentment join and share;
My tide is full;?There is new happiness in earth, in air:
All beautiful?And fresh the world but now so bare and dull.
But while we raise the cup of bliss so high,
Thus satisfied,?Another shore beneath a sad, far sky
Waiteth her tide,?And thirsts with sad complainings still denied.
On earth's remotest bound she sits and waits
In doubt and pain;?Our joy is signal for her sad estates;
Like dull refrain?Marring our song, her sighings rise in vain.
To each his turn--the ebb-tide and the flood,
The less, the more--?God metes his portions justly out, I know;
But still before?My mind forever floats that pale and grieving shore.
A YEAR.
She has been just a year in Heaven.?Unmarked by white moon or gold sun,?By stroke of clock or clang of bell,?Or shadow lengthening on the way,?In the full noon and perfect day,?In Safety's very citadel,?The happy hours have sped, have run;?And, rapt in peace, all pain forgot,?She whom we love, her white soul shriven,?Smiles at the thought and wonders not.
We have been just a year alone,--?A year whose calendar is sighs,?And dull, perpetual wishfulness,?And smiles, each covert for a tear,?And wandering thoughts, half there, half here,?And weariful attempts to guess?The secret of the hiding skies,?The soft, inexorable blue,?With gleaming hints of glory sown,?And Heaven behind, just shining through.
So sweet, so sad, so swift, so slow,?So full of eager growth and light,?So full of pain which blindly grows,?So full of thoughts which either way?Have passed and crossed and touched each day,?To us a thorn, to her a rose;?The year so black, the year so white,?Like rivers twain their course have run;?The earthly stream we trace and know,?But who shall paint the heavenly one?
A year! We gather up our powers,?Our lamps we consecrate and trim;?Open all windows to the day,?And welcome every heavenly air.?We will press forward and will bear,?Having this word to cheer the way:?She, storm-tossed once, is safe with Him,?Healed, comforted, content, forgiven;?And while we count these heavy hours?Has been a year,--a year in Heaven.
TOKENS.
Each day upon the yellow Nile, 'tis said.?Joseph, the youthful ruler, cast forth wheat,?That haply, floating to his father's feet,--?The sad old father, who believed him dead,--?It might be sign in Egypt there was bread;?And thus the patriarch, past the desert sands?And scant oasis fringed with thirsty green,?Be lured toward the love that yearned unseen.?So, flung and scattered--ah! by what dear hands?--?On the swift-rushing and invisible tide,?Small tokens drift adown from far, fair lands,?And say to us, who in the desert bide,?"Are you athirst? Are there no sheaves to bind??Beloved, here is fulness; follow on and find."
HER GOING.
SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE.
She stood in the open door,?She blessed them faint and low:?"I must go," she said, "must go?Away from the light of the sun,?Away from you, every one;?Must see your eyes no more,--?Your eyes, that love me so.
"I should not shudder thus,?Nor weep, nor be afraid.?Nor cling to you so dismayed,?Could I only pierce with ray eyes?Where the dark, dark shadow lies;?Where something hideous?Is hiding, perhaps," she said.
Then slowly she went from them,?Went down the staircase grim,?With trembling heart and limb;?Her footfalls echoed?In the silence vast and dead,?Like the notes of a requiem,?Not sung, but uttered.
For a little way and a black?She groped as grope the blind,?Then a sudden radiance