MIRIAM, AND OTHER POEMS. TO FREDERICK A. P. BAR NARD. And if perchance too late I linger where The flowers have ceased to blow, and trees are bare, Thou, wiser in thy choice, wilt scarcely blame The friend who shields his folly with thy name. AMESBURY, 10th mo., 1870. MIRIAM. ONE Sabbath day my friend and I Passed from the crowded village lanes, Slackened and heavy from the heat, To fruit-hung orchards, and the town Huge mills whose windows had the look Of eager eyes that ill could brook Glistening for miles above its mouth, Of ocean, from its curved coast-line; Sombred and still, the warm sunshine Filled with pale gold-dust all the reach So, sitting on that green hill-slope, It might have been, and yet was not. ran Over the whole vast field of man, In which, unquestioned, undenied, The old moralities which lent We give it power to cramp and kill, And I made answer "Truth is one; No scroll of creed its fulness wraps, "Nor doth it lessen what He taught, MIRIAM. The common growth that maketh good His all-embracing Fatherhood. "Wherever through the ages rise The altars of self-sacrifice, Where love its arms has opened wide, Or man for man has calmly died, I see the same white wings outspread That hovered o'er the Master's head! Up from undated time they come, The martyr souls of heathendom, And to His cross and passion bring Their fellowship of suffering. I trace His presence in the blind Pathetic gropings of my kind, In prayers from sin and sorrow wrung, In cradle-hymns of life they sung, Each, in its measure, but a part Of the unmeasured Over-Heart; And with a stronger faith confess The greater that it owns the less. Good cause it is for thankfulness That the world-blessing of His life With the long past is not at strife; That the great marvel of His death To the one order witnesseth, No doubt of changeless goodness wakes, No link of cause and sequence breaks, The pain and loss for others borne, worn, The life man giveth for his friend 66 So welcome I from every source The tokens of that primal Force, Older than heaven itself, yet new As the young heart it reaches to, Beneath whose steady impulse rolls The tidal wave of human souls; Guide, comforter, and inward word, The eternal spirit of the Lord! Nor fear I aught that science brings From searching through material things; Content to let its glasses prove, 421 The myriad worlds on worlds that course The spaces of the universe; And then, as is my wont, I told A story of the days of old, Not found in printed books, in sooth, A fancy, with slight hint of truth, Showing how differing faiths agree In one sweet law of charity. Meanwhile the sky had golden grown, Our faces in its glory shone; But shadows down the valley swept, And gray below the ocean slept, As time and space I wandered o'er To tread the Mogul's marble floor, And see a fairer sunset fall On Jumna's wave and Agra's wall. O'er which the feet of prayerful reverence passed, Met at the gate of Paradise at last. He sought an alcove of his cool hareem, Where, far beneath, he heard the Jumna's stream Lapse soft and low along his palace wall, And all about the cool sound of the fall Of fountains, and of water circling free Through marble ducts along the balcony; The voice of women in the distance sweet, And, sweeter still, of one who, at his feet, Soothed his tired ear with songs of a far land |