O brother, treading ever-darkening ways,
O sister, whelmed in ever-deepening care,
Would God we might unfold before your gaze
Some vision of the pure and true and fair!
Better to know, though sadder things be known,
Better to see, though tears half blind the sight,
Than thraldom to the sense, and heart of stone,
And horrible contentment with the night.
Oh, bring we then all sweet and gracious things
To touch the lives that lie so chill and drear,
That they may dream of some diviner sphere,
Whence each soft ray of love and beauty springs !
Each good and perfect gift is from above,
And there is healing for earth's direst woes;
God hath unsealed the springs of light and love,
To make the desert blossom as the rose.
W. WALSHAM STOWE,
Bishop of Bedford.
LONG ago a poet dreaming,
Weaving fancy's warp and woof,
Penned a tender, soothing poem
On the "Rain upon the Roof."
Once I read it, and its beauty
Filled my heart with memories sweet;
Days of childhood fluttered round me,
Violets sprang beneath my feet.
And my gentle, loving mother
Spoke again in accents mild,
Curbing every wayward passion
Of her happy, thoughtless child.
Then I heard the swallows twittering
Underneath the cabin eaves,
And the laughing shout of Willie
Up among the maple leaves.
Then I blessed the poet's dreaming-
Blessed his fancy's warp and woof,
And I wept o'er memories treasured,
As the rain fell on the roof.
Years ago I lost the poem,
But its sweetness lingered still,
As the freshness of the valley
Marks where flowed the springtime rill.
Lost to reach, but not to feeling;
For the rain-drop never falls
O'er my head with pattering music,
But it peoples memory's halls
With the old familiar faces
Loved and treasured long ago,
Treasured now as in life's springtime,-
For no change my heart can know.
And I live again my childhood
In the home far, far away;
Roam the woodland, orchard, wildwood,
With my playmates still at play;
Then my gray hairs press the pillow,
Holding all the world aloof,
Dreaming sweetly as I listen
To the rain upon the roof.
Every pattering drop that falleth
Seemeth like an angel's tread,
Bringing messages of mercy
To the weary heart and head.
Pleasant thoughts of years departed,
Pleasant soothings for to-day,
Earnest longings for to-morrow,
Hoping for the far away;
For I know each drop that falleth
Comes to bless the thirsty earth,
Making seed to bud and blossom,
Springing all things into birth.
As the radiant bow that scattereth
All our faithlessness with proof
Of a seedtime and a harvest,
So the rain upon the roof.
WHEN the humid shadows hover
Over all the starry spheres,
And the melancholy darkness
Gently weeps in rainy tears,
What a joy to press the pillow
Of a cottage-chamber bed,
And to listen to the patter
Of the soft rain overhead!
Every tinkle on the shingles
Has an echo in the heart,
And a thousand dreamy fancies
Into busy being start;
NOTE.This charming poem was so long a vagrant that its text became very much corrupted until the author furnished a version for publication in which the last verse read as follows:
Art hath nought of tone or cadence
That can work with such a spell
In the soul's mysterious fountains,
Whence the tears of rapture well,
As that melody of Nature,
That subdued, subduing strain,
Which is played upon the shingles
By the patter of the rain.
It also contained several minor differences in reading from the original. Where considered improvements, they have been adopted; but as a poet's first thoughts are often his best thoughts, I have taken the liberty to follow original "copy" where it seemed to chime best with the patter of the rain. I was the more emboldened to do this by the fact that poets are proverbially unsafe revisers of their own work. William Cullen Bryant edited the life out of many of his younger passages, while Tennyson i later days has retouched the spirit and force out of some of his earlier work.
A LITTLE Stream had lost its way
Amid the grass and fern;
A passing stranger scooped a well,
Where weary men might turn;
He walled it in, and hung with care
A ladle at the brink;
He thought not of the deed he did,
But judged that all might drink.
He passed again, and lol the well,
By summer never dried,
Had cooled ten thousand parching tongues,
And saved a life beside.
A nameless man, amid a crowd
That thronged the daily mart,
Let fall a word of hope and love,
Unstudied, from the heart;
A whisper on the tumult thrown,
A transitory breath-
It raised a brother from the dust,
It saved a soul from death.
O germ! O fount! O word of love!
O thought at random cast!
Ye were but little at the first,
But mighty at the last.
1 Here, on reading the note in manuscript, Mr. Francis F. Browne interjected the query, "Is it a fact?" and quoted the following verses from Gautier, as translated by Austin Dobson:
"O Poet! then forbear
The loosely-sandalled verse;
Choose rather thou to wear
The buskin, straight and terse.
"Leave to the tyro's hand
The limp and shapeless style;
See that thy form demand
The labor of the file."
THE king from the council chamber
Came, weary and sore of heart;
He called to Iliff, the painter,
And spoke to him thus apart:
I'm sickened of the faces ignoble,
Hypocrites, cowards, and knaves;
I shall shrink in their shrunken measure,
Chief slave in a realm of slaves.
Paint me a true man's picture,
Gracious, and wise, and good,
Dowered with the strength of heroes
And the beauty of womanhood.
It shall hang in my inmost chamber,
That, thither when I retire,
It may fill my soul with its grandeur,
"And warm it with sacred fire."
So the artist painted the picture,
And it hung in the palace hall;
Never a thing so lovely
Had garnished the stately wall.
The king, with head uncovered,
Gazed on it with rapt delight,
Till it suddenly wore strange meaning-
Baffled his questioning sight.
For the form was the supplest courtier's,
Perfect in every limb;
But the bearing was that of the henchman
Who filled the flagons for him;
The brow was a priest's, who pondered
His parchment early and late;
The eye was the wandering minstrel's,
Who sang at the palace gate.
The lips, half sad and half mirthful,
With a fitful trembling grace,
Were the very lips of a woman
He had kissed in the market-place; But the smiles which her curves transfigured,
As a rose with its shimmer of dew,
Was the smile of the wife who loved him,
Queen Ethelyn, good and true.
Then, "Learn, O King," said the artist,
"This truth that the picture tells -
That in every form of the human
Some hint of the highest dwells;
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