"Now have I seen the shining hand of Him Who sifts the world for His divine desire; And gathers, and within His quern's wide rim Grinds all things meet for His transforming fire, And kneads them to a purpose far and dim; Who fashions all things to His growing plan, And breaks ... and moulds ... and breaks the heart of man.
"Take Thou Thy will--so it be her's?..." A hope Shoots a faint arrow instantly--no more. A blinding fire falls from night's glimmering slope. Flame-like the twain meet on the rushy floor-- And vanish. King and clansmen blindly grope Into cool air. Across the sky two swans Fly slowly toward the day that palely dawns.
The long, dark slope is topped with mist, But here the sun is on the grass: Beneath, the sea-waves break, and twist Backward like snakes of molten glass.
Across an ancient sand-heaped wall The foot thro' graves forgotten goes, And stops where old, old voices call Thro' generations of repose.
But where a sorrow of to-day Has set a freshly-fashioned mound, A bird slides down his airy way And makes the silence ring with sound.
What gloom might now our spirits balk Fades out before that high reproof; And thro' the fabric of your talk Go light and shadow, warp and woof,
With something deeper than the word,-- Some stately certitude of faith Whose eye at Life had never blurred, Nor quivered at the eye of Death,
But saw, in that swift, woman's way, Thro' changings to the changeless Whole, And Life and Death as waves that sway Across the ocean of the Soul.
Then when the hill was lost in mist, And in the sea the sky was glassed, We wandered home in amethyst; And you upon the morrow passed
On that last journey to the West Whose end was in the Atlantic wave, Where, on your youth's triumphant crest, One stroke, another's life to save,
With glory crowned your life complete, Proud as the horsed and pluméd seas That laid your body at my feet-- A wonder past Praxiteles.
Oh! bear her by the weeping crest, And past the fields of fallen ears, On her last journey from the West, This holy Lady Day of tears.
But yet, tho' heads are bared and bowed, And down the road the keeners keen, Some spirit-music, deep and proud, Slips out their thin, shrill cries between
And, like the bird that other day, That made the silence ring with sound, It floats along the sun-set way, A joy above our sorrow's mound.