One side I see the summer fields Flame the first tints of frosty sheen. Ah, middle-point, where cloud and storm I bow me to the threatening gale: An Indian-summer comes at last! "UNDER THE CLOUD AND THROUGH THE SEA." So moved they, when false Pharaoh's legion pressed, Sons of old Israel, at their God's behest, Under the cloud and through the swelling sea. So passed they, fearless, where the parted wave, So led He them, in desert marches grand, And Jordan raged along his rocky bed, And Amorite spears flashed keen and fearfully: Still the same pathway must their footsteps tread,Under the cloud and through the threatening sea. God works no otherwise. No mighty birth Sons of the Saints who faced their Jordan-flood O countrymen! God's day is not yet done! Count it a covenant, that He leads us on Beneath the Cloud and through the crimson Sea! BEHIND THE MASK. It was an old, distorted face, An uncouth visage, rough and wild,— And so, contrasting strange to-day, Behind gray hairs and furrowed brow How the child hides, and is not gone. For while the inexorable years To saddened features fit their mould, Waits something that will not grow old! The rifted pine upon the hill, Scarred by the lightning and the wind, And many a storm-blast, fiercely sent, The struggling soul must wear in pain; Yet when she comes to claim her own, SPARROWS. Little birds sit on the telegraph-wires, And chitter, and flitter, and fold their wings; Maybe they think that for them and their sires Stretched always, on purpose, those wonderful strings: And perhaps the Thought that the world inspires, Little birds sit on the slender lines, And the news of the world runs under their feet: How value rises, and how declines, How kings with their armies in battle meet; And all the while, 'mid the soundless signs, They chirp their small gossipings, foolish-sweet. Little things light on the lines of our lives,— Hopes, and joys, and acts of to-day; And we think that for these the Lord contrives, Yet from end to end his meaning arrives, And his word runs underneath all the way. Is life only wires and lightnings then, Apart from that which about it clings? Are the thoughts, and the works, and the prayers of men Only sparrows that light on God's telegraph-strings, Holding a moment, and gone again? Nay; He planned for the birds, with the larger things. "I WILL ABIDE IN THINE HOUSE." Among so many, can He care? Over; but in? The world is full; So many, and so wide abroad; From the great spaces, vague and dim, I asked my soul bethought of this: In just that very place of his John Ghillier THE PAGEANT. A sound as if from bells of silver, A brightness which outshines the morning, I leave the trodden village highway For virgin snow-paths glimmering through Where, keen against the walls of sapphire, I tread in Orient halls enchanted, I dream the Saga's dream of caves I walk the land of Eldorado, I touch its mimic garden bowers, Its silver leaves and diamond flowers! |