Since o’er thy footstool here below
Such radiant gems are strown,
Oh, what magnificence must glow,
My God, about thy throne!
So brilliant here these drops of light,
There the full ocean rolls, how bright!
If night’s blue curtain of the sky,
With thousand stars inwrought,
Hung like a royal canopy
With...
Now summer finds her perfect prime;
Sweet blows the wind from western calms;
On every bower red roses climb;
The meadows sleep in mingled balms.
Nor stream, nor bank the wayside by,
But lilies float and daisies throng;
Nor space of blue and sunny sky
That is not cleft with soaring song.
O flowery morns, O tuneful eves,...
Heaven is open every day;
In night also
He that would wend his upward way
May surely go.
There is no wall to that demesne
Where God resides; nor any screen
To hide the glories of that scene,—
If man will know.
The ladder which the Hebrew saw
Whenas he slept,
From earth God never doth...
What! dost thou pray that the outgone tide be rolled back on the strand,
The flame be rekindled that mounted away from the smouldering brand,
The past-summer harvest flow golden through stubble-lands snaked and sere,
The winter-gray woods upgather and quicken the leaves of last year?—
Thy prayers are as clouds in a drouth; regardless, unfruitful, they roll;...
only to find Forever, blest
By thine encircling arm;
Only to lie beyond unrest
In passion’s dreamy calm!
Only to meet and never part,
To sleep and never wake,—
Heart unto heart and soul to soul,
Dead for each other’s sake.
[Written in September, 1789, on the anniversary of the day on which he heard of the death of his early love, Mary Campbell.]
THOU lingering star, with lessening ray,
That lov’st to greet the early morn,
Again thou usher’st in the day
My Mary from my soul was torn.
O Mary! dear departed shade!
Where is thy place of blissful rest?
...
I Never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spake with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
High thoughts!
They come and go,
Like the soft breathings of a listening maiden,
While round me flow
The winds, from woods and fields with gladness laden:
When the corn’s rustle on the ear doth come—
When the eve’s beetle sounds its drowsy hum—
When the stars, dew-drops of the summer sky,
Watch over all with soft and...
That clime is not like this dull clime of ours;
All, all is brightness there;
A sweeter influence breathes around its flowers,
And a benigner air.
No calm below is like that calm above,
No region here is like that realm of love;
Earth’s softest spring ne’er shed so soft a light,
Earth’s brightest summer never shone so bright....
From the Persian by William R. Alger
TO heaven approached a Sufi Saint,
From groping in the darkness late,
And, tapping timidly and faint,
Besought admission at God’s gate.
Said God, “Who seeks to enter here?”
“’T is I, dear Friend,” the Saint replied,
And trembling much with hope and fear.
“If it be thou, without abide...
