James Freeman Clarke, on his seventy-eighth birthday, wrote this
significant bit of verse:
Be happy now and ever
That from the love divine no power the soul shall sever:
For not our feeble nor our stormy past,
Nor shadows from the future backward cast;
Not all the gulfs of evil far below,
Nor mountain-peaks of good which soar on high
Into the unstained sky,
Nor any power the universe can know;
Not the vast laws to whose control are given
The blades of grass just springing from the sod,
And stars within the unsounded depths of heaven--
Can touch the spirit hid with Christ in God.
For nought that He has made, below, above,
Can part us from His love.
(1912)