PART X.

Life, Heligion, and Death's Mystery.

Resembles life what once was held of light,
Too ample in itself for human sight?
An absolute self? an element ungrounded?
All that we see, all colors of all shade
By encroach of darkness made?

Is very life, my consciousness, unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath
A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?

COLERIDGE.

PART X.

Life, Religion, and Death's Mystery.

WHAT IS LIFE?

WHAT is life?

'Tis a beautiful shell

Thrown up by eternity's flow

On time's bank of quicksands to dwell,
And a moment its loveliness show;
Gone back to its element grand
Is the billow that washed it ashore.
See! another now washes the strand!
And the beautiful shell is no more.

MY AIM.

I LIVE for those who love me,
For those who know me true,
For the heavens that bend above me,
And the good that I can do;

For the cause that needs assistance,
For the wrongs that lack resistance,
For the future in the distance,
And the good that I can do.

THOMAS GUTHRIE.

THE BRIDGE OF LIFE.

ACROSS the rapid stream of seventy years
The slender bridge of human life is thrown;
The past and future form its mouldering piers,
The present moment is its frail keystone.

From "dust thou art" the arch begins to rise,
"To dust" the fashion of its form descends,
"Shalt thou return," the higher curve implies,
In which the first to the last lowness bends.

Seen by youth's magic light upon that arch,
How lovely does each far-off scene appear!
But ah! how changed when on the onward march
Our weary footsteps bring the vision near !

'T was fabled that beneath the rainbow's foot
A treasure lay, the dreamer to bewitch;

And many wasted in the vain pursuit

The golden years that would have made them rich.

So where life's arch of many colors leads,
The heart expects rich wealth of joy to find;
But in the distance the bright hope recedes,
And leaves a cold, gray waste of care behind.

A sunlit stream upon its bosom takes

The inverted shadow of a bridge on high,
And thus the arch in air and water makes
One perfect circle to the gazer's eye.

So 't is with life; the things that do appear
Are fleeting shadows on time's passing tide,
Cast by the sunshine of a larger sphere

From viewless things that changelessly abide.

The real is but the half of life; it needs
The ideal to make a perfect whole;
The sphere of sense is incomplete, and pleads
For closer union with the sphere of soul.

All things of use are bridges that conduct

To things of faith, which give them truest worth; And Christ's own parables do us instruct That heaven is but a counterpart of earth.

The pier that rests upon this shore's the same
As that which stands upon the farther bank;
And fitness for our duties here will frame
A fitness for the joys of higher rank.

Oh! dark were life without heaven's sun to show
The likeness of the other world in this;
And bare and poor would be our lot below
Without the shadow of a world of bliss.

Then let us, passing o'er life's fragile arch,
Regard it as a means, and not an end;
As but the path of faith on which we march
To where all glories of our being tend.