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TH

1885.

HROUGH forty years of wedded life, God grant brought nearer heaven, How full of light and love, dear wife,

Our journey hath been given!

So little have we known of woe,
From want so far removed,
Almost a paradise below,

Wherever we have roved.

By manna fed, on God's own word,
And in his grace grown strong,

Their forty years of pilgrimage

Our fathers thought full long.

But Love Divine our life hath crowned
With blessings all the way,

And sweetly still the years run round,
Love's counsels to obey.

The air presages frost and snow,

The trees have shed their leaves,
But every season hath its own
Dear ministry of sheaves.

And in our blest experience
There are no make-believes;
For God is love, and every day
Gives all that faith receives.

The whole of self that raises us
To pride for what we seem,
Were but a sentence and a curse,
Like old Belshazzar's dream!

If grace did never interpose,
Of reason so bereft,

No remnant but of sins and woes
Had in man's life been left.

Dear Lord! how good, how kind, how mild,
Thy discipline hath been;

Though oft by folly almost spoiled,

Through threescore years and ten.

It might have been a vale of tears,
But filled with rainbows bright,
The retrospective vision wears
A radiance of delight.

H

And could we live our years again,
By old experience taught,
Except new grace upheld us still,
Experience would be nought.

From every wilderness of wrong,
Led forth, redeemed, forgiven;
Dear Miriam's and Moses' song
Shall be renewed in heaven.

O day of gifts that ushered in
The empire of my wife!

O day of days, when thou wast given
To be my star of life!

Sweet firmament of heavenly grace!

The rising of a morn,

With radiant lights and melodies

To brighten and adorn!

WHAT

1886.

WHAT loving-kindness in disguise From the great city bade us rise To this enchanted ground;

Where, midst the rage of angry seas,
As from an Ararat we gaze

The lovely landscape round.

A mount of vast and clear survey,
Where shepherds from the king's highway
With pilgrims might have come;
To show through telescopic eye
Far off the pearly gates on high

Of their celestial home.

For Jacob's ladder doth appear,
And angels are descending here.
In clouds of heavenly flame;
And in the north, angelic hosts,
With diamond spears rush to their posts,
In love's celestial name.

All unimaginable hues

The dying hours of day diffuse,
Colors so deep and fair,
As if the lightning and the sun
Had met and mingled into one
Magnetic impulse there.

The glory and the peace supreme.
The evening light, the sunset gleam,
A sea with diamonds riven:
Horizons lost in boundless air,
Hills rising as a verdant stair,
Whose landing-place is heaven.

The sky reflected in a glow
Of richer, mellower light below,
A new creation seems.
The river with a soul imbued,
Reverberates infinitude,

As in the change of dreams.

And mirrored in its silent face,
This wondrous evanescent grace,
Shed from the heavens abroad,
Uprises as a radiant glance,
The indwelling soul's adoring trance,
Where Nature worships God.

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