Calm death, God of crossed hands and passionless eyes,
Thou God that never heedest gift nor prayer,
Men blindly call thee cruel, unaware
That everything is dearer since it dies.
Worn by the chain of years, without surprise,
The wise man welcomes thee, and...

O ye who see with other eyes than ours,
And speak with tongues we are too deaf to hear,
Whose touch we cannot feel yet know ye near,
When, with a sense of yet undreamed-of powers,
We sudden pierce the cloud of sense that lowers,
Enwrapping us as ’t were...

Through some strange sense of sight or touch
I find what all have found before,
The presence I have feared so much,
The unknown’s immaterial door.

I seek not and it comes to me;
The do not know the thing I find:
The fillet of fatality
...

I Shall go out when the light comes in—
  There lie my cast-off form and face;
I shall pass Dawn on her way to earth,
  As I seek for a path through space.

I shall go out when the light comes in;
  Would I might take one ray with me!
It is...

Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass,
Whah de branch ’ll go a-singin’ as it pass.
  An’ w’en I ’s a-layin’ low,
  I kin hyeah it as it go
Singin’, “Sleep, my honey, tek yo’ res’ at las’.”

Lay me nigh to whah hit meks a little pool,
An’ de...

From the Dutch by H. S. Van Dyk

A HOST of angels flying,
  Through cloudless skies impelled,
  Upon the earth beheld
A pearl of beauty lying,
  Worthy to glitter bright
  In heaven’s vast hall of light.

They saw, with glances tender,...

Poet: Dirk Smits

      “TILL death us part,”
      Thus speaks the heart
When each to each repeats the words of doom;
      For better and for worse,
      Through blessing and through curse,
We shall be one, till life’s last hour shall come.

      Life with its...

From “Hamlet,” Act III. Sc. 1.
  HAMLET.—To be, or not to be,—that is the question:—
Whether ’t is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them?—To die, to...

   [These verses are said to have “chilled the heart” of Oliver Cromwell.]

THE GLORIES of our blood and state
  Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armor against fate;
  Death lays his icy hand on kings:
      Sceptre and crown
      ...

      LEAVES have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind’s breath,
      And stars to set—but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, oh! Death.

      Day is for mortal care,
Eve for glad meetings round the joyous hearth,...