Till the slow mountain's dial-hand Shorten to noon's triumphal hour, While ye sit idle, do ye think The Lord's great work sits idle too? That light dare not o'erleap the brink Of morn, because 't is dark with you? Though yet your valleys skulk in night, In God's ripe fields the day is cried, And reapers, with their sickles bright, Troop, singing, down the mountainside: Come up, and feel what health there is In the frank Dawn's delighted eyes, As, bending with a pitying kiss, The night-shed tears of Earth she dries! The Lord wants reapers: O, mount up, Before night comes, and says, "Too late!" Stay not for taking scrip or cup, The Master hungers while ye wait; "T is from these heights alone your eyes The advancing spears of day can see, That o'er the eastern hill-tops rise, To break your long captivity. II. Lone watcher on the mountain-height, But we, who in the shadow sit, Know also when the day is nigh, Seeing thy shining forehead lit With his inspiring prophecy. Thou hast thine office; we have ours; And when he giveth work to do, But not the less do thou aspire Light's earlier messages to preach; Keep back no syllable of fire, Plunge deep the rowels of thy speech. Yet God deems not thine aeried sight More worthy than our twilight dim; For meek Obedience, too, is Light, And following that is finding Him. THE CAPTIVE. It was past the hour of trysting, From its toiling at the mill. Then the great moon on a sudden O'er the eastern hill-top stood, Dread closed vast and vague about her, From the blighting of the sea. Yet he came not, and the stillness Looking on her through the gloom, She could hear the groping footsteps Of some blind, gigantic doom. Suddenly the silence wavered Like a light mist in the wind, For a voice broke gently through it, Felt like sunshine by the blind, And the dread, like mist in sunshine, "Once my love, my love forever, As from Holy Land I came. "On a green spot in the desert, Gleaming like an emerald star, "There thou 'lt find the humble postern Surely will not say thee no." Slept again the aspen silence, But her loneliness was o'er ; Round her soul a motherly patience Clasped its arms forevermore; From her heart ebbed back the sorrow, Leaving smooth the golden shore. Donned she now the pilgrim scallop, Took the pilgrim staff in hand; Like a cloud-shade, flitting eastward, Wandered she o'er sea and land; And her footsteps in the desert Fell like cool rain on the sand. Soon, beneath the palm-tree's shadow, There she saw no surly warder With an eye like bolt and bar; Through her soul a sense of music Throbbed, and, like a guardian Lar, On the threshold stood an angel, Bright and silent as a star. Fairest seemed he of God's seraphs, Then she heard a voice come onward Well the happy song she knew. Forward leaped she o'er the threshold, Fell from her the spirit's languor, THE BIRCH-TREE. RIPPLING through thy branches goes the sunshine, Among thy leaves that palpitate for ever; Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had pris oned, The soul once of some tremulous inland river, Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb forever! While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine, Holds up its leaves in happy, happy stillness, Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended, I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands, And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence. On the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet, Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad, Dripping round thy slim white stem, whose shadow Slopes quivering down the water's dusky quiet, Thou shrink'st as on her bath's edge would some startled Naiad. Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers; Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping; Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience, And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping |