Does the road wind up hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet...
Sometime, when all life’s lessons have been learned,
And sun and stars forevermore have set,
The things which our weak judgments here have spurned,
The things o’er which we grieved with lashes wet,
Will flash before us, out of life’s dark night,
As stars shine most in deeper tints of blue;
And we shall see how all God’s plans are right,...
He sendeth sun, he sendeth shower,
Alike they ’re needful for the flower;
And joys and tears alike are sent
To give the soul fit nourishment:
As comes to me or cloud or sun,
Father, thy will, not mine, be done!
Can loving children e’er reprove
With murmurs whom they trust and love?
Creator, I would ever be
A trusting...
Methinks we do as fretful children do,
Leaning their faces on the window-pane
To sigh the glass dim with their own breath’s stain,
And shut the sky and landscape from their view;
And, thus, alas! since God the maker drew
A mystic separation ’twixt those twain,—
The life beyond us and our souls in pain,—
We miss the prospect which...
“But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.”—HEBREWS xi. 16.
I ’M far frae my hame, an’ I ’m weary aftenwhiles,
For the langed-for hame-bringing, an’ my Father’s welcome smiles;
I ’ll never be fu’ content, until mine een do see
The shining gates o’ heaven an’ my ain countree.
The earth is flecked wi’ flowers, mony-tinted, fresh, an...
“At even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning.”—MARK xiii. 35.
“IT may be in the evening,
When the work of the day is done,
And you have time to sit in the twilight
And watch the sinking sun,
While the long bright day dies slowly
Over the sea,
And the hour grows quiet and holy
With thoughts...
Methinks, when on the languid eye
Life’s autumn scenes grow dim;
When evening’s shadows veil the sky;
And pleasure’s siren hymn
Grows fainter on the tuneless ear,
Like echoes from another sphere,
Or dreams of seraphim—
It were not sad to cast away
This dull and cumbrous load of clay.
It were not sad to feel the...
“And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.”—DEUTERONOMY xxxiv. 6.
BY Nebo’s lonely mountain,
On this side Jordan’s wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab,
There lies a lonely grave;
But no man built that sepulchre,
And no man saw it e’er;
For the angels of...
At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to where—by death, fools think, imprisoned—
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,
—Pity me?
Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly...
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.
