Page:Poems Shipton.djvu/139

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Each dash of the roaring breakers sounds sad as a funeral knell;
The sob, and the shriek, and the struggle, seem borne on the billowy swell.

Yet dwell not alone on the parting, let memory return to the years
When your tenderness soothed the sad-hearted—your hand dried the sorrowful tears,
When one goal and one hope on your pathway alike their glad promises shed:
Our God is the God of the living—then mourn not the living as dead.

Were your wanderers alone, then, forsaken—unheard on the angry wave?
Unseen by thy Saviour, who raised the dead from the bier and the grave?
Not lost in the ocean's dark caverns the loved of your household sleep,
But above, in a halo of glory, their watch with the angels keep.

Afar from the strife and the terror, secure in our Father's home,
O'er the waste of the world's wild waters they wait for their loved to come.
No trace of their meek endurance o'ershadows the freed ones' brow;