T lies around us like a cloud- THE OTHER WORLD. Its gentle breezes fau our cheek; And mingle with our prayers. weet hearts around us throb and beat, The silence-awful, sweet, and calm- So thin, so soft, so sweet they glide, And in the hush of rest they bring How lovely and how sweet a pass To close the eye and close the ear, All sorrow and all care. Sweet souls around us! watch us still, Let death between us be as naught, Your joy be the reality, Our suffering life the dream. TERNITY will be one glorious morning, with the sun ever climbing higher and higher; one blessed spring-time, and yet richer summer-every plant in full flower, but every flower the bud of a lovelier. I WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAY. WOULD not live alway: I ask not to stay Leaves her brilliance to fade in the night of despair, I would not live alway, thus fettered by sin, I would not live alway: no, welcome the tomb; O, soft be my slumbers on that holy bed! And then the glad morn soon to follow that night, Who, who would live alway, away from his God, Let me hasten my flight to those mansions above, WILLIAM AUGUSTUS MUHLENBERG. THE REST OF THE SOUL. N that hour which of all the twenty-four is most emblematical of heaven and suggestive of repose, the eventide, in which instinctively Isaac went into the fields to meditate when the work of the day is done, when the mind has ceased its tension, when the passions are lulled to rest in spite of themselves, by the spell of the quiet starlit sky-it is then, amidst the silence of the lull of all the lower parts of our nature, that the soul comes forth to do its work. Then the peculiar, strange work of the soul, which the intellect cannot do, meditation begins; awe and worship and wonder are in full exercise; and love begins then its purest form of mystic adoration, and pervasive and undefined tenderness, separate from all that is coarse and earthly, swelling as if it would embrace the All in its desire to bless, and lose itself in the sea of the love of God. the soul-the exercise and play of all the nobler powers. This is the rest of THE "FOLLOW ME." SHE shadow of the mountain falls athwart the lowly plain, And the shadow of the cloudlet hangs above the mountain's head: And the highest hearts and lowest wear the shadow of some pain, And the smile has scarcely flitted ere the anguished tear is shed. For no eyes have there been ever without a weary tear, And those lips cannot be human which have never heaved a sigh; For without the dreary winter there has never been a year, And the tempests hide their terrors in the calmest summer sky. So this dreamy life is passing- and we move amidst its maze, And we grope along together, half in darkness, half in light; And our hearts are often burdened with the mysteries of our ways. Which are never all in shadow, and are never wholly bright. And our dim eyes ask a beacon, and our weary feet a guide, And our hearts of all life's mysteries seek the meaning and the key; And a cross gleams o'er our pathway, on it hangs the Crucified, And He answers all our yearnings by the whisper, "Follow Me." ALL BEFORE. ABRAM T. RYAN. HEARTS that never cease to yearn. O brimming tears that ne'er are dried! The dead, though they depart, return As though they had not died! The living are the only dead; The dead live — nevermore to die! And though they lie beneath the waves, Yet every grave gives up its dead Ere it is overgrown with grass; Then why should hopeless tears be shed, Or need we cry, "Alas"? Y THE DIVINE ABODE. E golden lamps of heaven, farewell, With all your feeble light! Farewell, thou ever-changing moon And thou, refulgent orb of day, In brighter flames arrayed; My soul, that springs beyond thy sphere, No more demands thy aid. Ye stars are but the shining dust Of my divine abode; The pavement of those heavenly courts There all the millions of his saints Shall in one song unite; And each the bliss of all shall view PHILIP DODDRIDGE. |