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قراءة كتاب Lays and legends (Second Series)
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اللغة: English
الصفحة رقم: 3
class="line i1h">The struggle and sorrow and smart.
The dreams that never were deeds,
The thought that shines not in word,
The struggle that never succeeds—
Thou hast saved me from these, O Lord!
I stood in my humble place
While those who aimed high fell low;
Oh the glorious gift of Thy grace
The souls of Thy saved ones know!
And yet if in heaven at last,
When all is won and is well,
Dear hands stretch out from the past,
Dear voices call me from hell—
My love whom I long for yet,
My little one gone astray!—
No; God will make me forget
In His own wise wonderful way.
Oh the infinite marvels of grace,
Oh the great atonement's cost!
Lifting my soul above
Those other souls that are lost!
Mine are the harp and throne,
Theirs is the outer night.
This, my God, Thou has done,
And all that Thou dost is right!
II.
Lost as I am—degraded, foul, polluted,
Sunk in deep sloughs of failure and of sin,
Yet is my hell by God's great grace commuted,
For what I lose the others yet may win.
I—sport of flesh and fate—in all my living
Met the world's laughter and the Christian's frown,
Ever the spirit fiercely vainly striving,
Ever the flesh, triumphant, laughed it down.
Down, lower still, but ever battling vainly,
Dying to win, yet living to be lost,
My soul through depths where all its guilt showed plainly
Into the chaos of despair was tossed.
Yet not despair. I see far off a splendour;
Here from my hell I see a heaven on high
For those brave men whom earth could never render
Cowards as foul and beasts as base as I!
Hell is not hell lit by such consolation,
That, though my soul may never see salvation,
God yet saves all these other souls of His!
The waves of death come faster, faster, faster;
Christ, ere I perish, hear my heart's last word—
It was not I denied my Lord and Master;
The flesh denied Thee, not the spirit, Lord.
And God be praised that other men are wearing
The white, white flower I trampled as I trod;
That all fail not, that all are not despairing,
That all are not as I, I thank Thee, God!
AT THE PRISON GATE.
And underneath us are the everlasting arms.
Once by a foreign prison gate,
Deep in the gloom of frowning stone,
I saw a woman, desolate,
Sitting alone;
Immeasurable pain enwound
Infinite anguish lapped her round,
As the sea laps some sunken shore
Where flowers will blossom never more.
Despair sat shrined in her dry eyes—
Her heart, I thought, in blood must weep
For hopes that never more can rise
From their death-sleep;
And round her hovered phantoms gray—
Ghosts of delight dead many a day;
And all the thorns of life seemed wed
In one sharp crown about her head.
And all the poor world's aching heart
Beat there, I thought, and could not break.
Oh! to be strong to bear the smart—
The vast heart-ache!
Then through my soul a clear light shone;
What I would do, my Lord has done;
He bore the whole world's crown of thorn—
For her sake, too, that crown was worn!
THE DEVIL'S DUE.
A priest tells how, in his youth, a church was built by the free labour of love—as was men's wont in those days; and how the stone and wood were paid for by one who had grown rich on usury and the pillage of the poor—and of what chanced thereafter.
Arsenius, priest of God, I tell,
For warning in your younger ears,
Humbly and plainly what befel
That year—gone by a many years—
When Veraignes church was built. Ah! then
Brave churches grew 'neath hands of men:
We see not now their like again.
We built it on the green hill-side
That leans its bosom o'er the town,
So that its presence, sanctified,
Might ever on our lives look down.
We built; and those who built not, they
Brought us their blessing day by day,
And lingered to rejoice and pray.
For years the masons toiled, for years
The craftsmen wrought till they had made
A church we scarce could see for tears—
Its fairness made our love afraid.
Its clear-cut cream-white tracery
Stood out against the deep bright sky
Like good deeds 'gainst eternity.
In the deep roof each separate beam
Had its