VESTA
O Christ of God! whose life and death
Our own have reconciled,
Most quietly, most tenderly
Take home Thy star-named child!
Thy grace is in her patient eyes,
Thy words are on her tongue;
The very silence round her seems
As if the angels sung.
Her smile is as a listening child’s
Who hears its mother call;
The lilies of Thy perfect peace
About her pillow fall.
She leans from out our clinging arms
To rest herself in Thine;
Alone to Thee, dear Lord, can we
Our well-beloved resign!
Oh, less for her than for ourselves
We bow our heads and pray;
Her setting star, like Bethlehem’s,
To Thee shall point the way!
CHILD-SONGS
Still linger in our noon of time
And on our Saxon tongue
The echoes of the home-born hymns
The Aryan mothers sung.
And childhood had its litanies
In every age and clime;
The earliest cradles of the race
Were rocked to poet’s rhyme.
Nor sky, nor wave, nor tree, nor flower,
Nor green earth’s virgin sod,
So moved the singer’s heart of old
As these small ones of God.
The mystery of unfolding life
Was more than dawning morn,
Than opening flower or crescent moon
The human soul new-born!
And still to childhood’s sweet appeal
The heart of genius turns,
And more than all the sages teach
From lisping voices learns,—
The voices loved of him who sang,
Where Tweed and Teviot glide,
That sound to-day on all the winds
That blow from Rydal-side,—
Heard in the Teuton’s household songs,
And folk-lore of the Finn,
Where’er to holy Christmas hearths
The Christ-child enters in!
Before life’s sweetest mystery still
The heart in reverence kneels;
The wonder of the primal birth
The latest mother feels.
We need love’s tender lessons taught
As only weakness can;
God hath His small interpreters;
The child must teach the man.
We wander wide through evil years,
Our eyes of faith grow dim;
But he is freshest from His hands
And nearest unto Him!
And haply, pleading long with Him
For sin-sick hearts and cold,
The angels of our childhood still
The Father’s face behold.
Of such the kingdom!—Teach Thou us,
O Master most divine,
To feel the deep significance
Of these wise words of Thine!
The haughty eye shall seek in vain
What innocence beholds;
No cunning finds the key of heaven,
No strength its gate unfolds.
Alone to guilelessness and love
That gate shall open fall;
The mind of pride is nothingness,
The childlike heart is all!
THE HEALER
TO A YOUNG PHYSICIAN, WITH DORÉ’S PICTURE OF CHRIST HEALING THE SICK
So stood of old the holy Christ
Amidst the suffering throng;
With whom His lightest touch sufficed
To make the weakest strong.
