Our dwelling is in the Almighty's hand;
We come and we go at his command.
Though joy or sorrow may mark our track,
His will is our guide, and we look not back:
And if, in our wrath, ye would turn us away,
Or win us in gentlest airs to play,
Then lift up your hearts to him who binds
Or frees, as he will, the obedient Winds!
DISSENSION.
ALAS! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love?
Hearts that the world in vain had tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied;
That stood the storm, when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off,
Like ships, that have gone down at sea,
When heaven was all tranquillity!
A something, light as air-a look,
A word unkind or wrongly taken-
Oh! love, that tempests never shook,
A breath, a touch like this hath shaken.
And ruder words will soon rush in
To spread the breach that words begin;
And eyes forget the gentle ray
They wore in courtship's smiling day;
And voices lose the tone that shed
A tenderness round all they said,
Till fast declining, one by one,
The sweetnesses of love are gone,
And hearts, so lately mingled, seem
Like broken clouds-or like the stream,
That smiling left the mountain's brow,
As though its waters ne'er could sever,
Yet, ere it reach the plain below,
Breaks into floods, that part for ever.
"Tis not the loud, obstreperous grief,
That rudely clamours for relief-
"Tis not the querulous lament,
In which impatience seeks a vent:
"T is not the soft pathetic style,
Which aims our pity to beguile;
That can to truth's keen eye impart
The real sorrows' of the heart!
No!-'tis the tear in secret shed
Upon the starving infant's head;
The sigh that will not be repress'd,
Breathed on the faithful partner's breast:
The bursting heart, the imploring eye,
To heaven upraised in agony,
With starts of desultory prayer,
While hope is quenched in despair;
The throbbing temple's burning pain,
While frenzy's fiend usurps the brain;
These are traits no art can borrow,
Of genuine suffering and of sorrow!
OUR life is twofold; sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy:
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past,-they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power-
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain:
They make us what we are not-what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanish'd shadows-are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? what are they?
Creations of the mind?-The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dream'd
Perchance in sleep-for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years, -
And curdles a long life into one hour.
WHO, when naught is heard around
But the great ocean's solemn sound,
Feels not as if the eternal God
Were speaking in that dread abode ?
An answering voice seems kindly given,
From the multitude of stars in heaven:
And oft a smile of moonlight fair
To perfect peace has changed despair.
Low as we are, we blend our fate
With things so beautifully great;
And, though opprest with heaviest grief,
From nature's bliss we draw relief,
Assured that God's most gracious eye
Beholds us in our misery,
And sends mild sound and lovely sight,
To change that misery to delight.
THERE's a bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream, And the nightingale sings round it all the day long;
In the time of my childhood 'twas like a sweet dream,
To sit in the roses and hear the bird's song. That bower and its roses I never forget,
But oft when alone in the bloom of the year, I think, is the nightingale singing there yet?
Are the roses still bright by the calm Bendemeer?
No, the roses soon wither'd that hung o'er the wave, But some blossoms were gather'd while freshly they shone,
And a dew was distill'd from the flowers, that gave All the fragrance of summer, when summer was
Thus memory draws from delight ere it dies,
An essence that breathes of it many a year,
Thus bright to my soul, as 't was then to my eyes,
Is that bower on the banks of the calm Bendemeer.
How sweet and solemn, all alone,
With reverent step, from stone to stone
In a small village churchyard lying,
O'er intervening flowers to move-
And as we read the names unknown,
Of young and old, to judgment gone,
And hear, in the calm air above,
Time onwards softly flying,
To meditate in Christian love,
Upon the dead and dying!
Such is the scene around me now:-
A little churchyard on the brow
Of a green pastoral hill;
Its sylvan village sleeps below,
And faintly, here, is heard the flow
Of Woodburn's summer rill;
A place where all things mournful meet,
And, yet, the sweetest of the sweet!-
The stillest of the still!
With what a pensive beauty fall
Across the mossy mouldering wall
That rose-tree's cluster'd arches! See
The robin-red breast, warily,
Bright through the blossoms leave his nest:
Sweet ingrate! through the winter blest
At the firesides of men-but shy
Through all the many summer hours,-
He hides himself among the flowers
In his own wild festivity.
What lulling sound, and shadow cool,
Hangs half the darken'd churchyard o'er,
From thy green depths, so beautiful,
Thou gorgeous sycamore!
Oft hath the lowly wine and bread,
Been blest beneath thy murmuring tent;
Where many a bright and hoary head,
Bow'd at that awful sacrament.
Now all beneath the turf are laid,
On which they sat, and sang,
Above that consecrated tree
Ascends the tapering spire, that seems
To lift the soul up silently
To heaven, with all its dreams!-
While in the belfry, deep and low,
From his heaved bosom's purple gleams
The dove's continuous murmurs flow,
A dirge-like song,-half bliss, half woe,-
The voice so lonely seems!
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