The skies are sown with stars tonight,
The sea is sown with light,
The hollows of the heaving floor
Gleam deep with light once more,
The racing ebb-tide flashes past
And seeks the vacant vast,
A wind steals from a world asleep
And walks the restless deep.
It walks the deep in ecstasy,
It lives! and loves to free
Its spirit to the silent night,
And breathes deep in delight;
Above the sea that knows no coast,
Beneath the starry host,
The wind walks like the souls of men
Who walk with God again.
The souls of men who walk with God!
With faith's firm sandals shod,
A lambent passion, body-free,
Fain for eternity!
O spirit born of human sighs,
Set loose 'twixt sea and skies,
Be thou an Angel of mankind,
Thou night-unfettered wind!
Bear thou the dreams of weary earth,
Bear thou Tomorrow's birth,
Take all our longings up to Him
Until His stars grow dim;
A moving anchorage of prayer,
Thou cool and healing air,
Heading off-shore till shoreless dawn
Breaks fair and night is gone.
_Samuel McCoy_
"THE HILL-FLOWERS"
"_I will lift up mine eyes to the hills._"
I
_Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Ere I waken in the city--Life, thy dawn makes all things new!
And up a fir-clad glen, far from all the haunts of men,
Up a glen among the mountains, oh my feet are wings again!_
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
O mountains of my boyhood, I come again to you,
By the little path I know, with the sea far below,
And above, the great cloud-galleons with their sails of rose and snow;
As of old, when all was young, and the earth a song unsung
And the heather through the crimson dawn its Eden incense flung
From the mountain-heights of joy, for a careless-hearted boy,
And the lavrocks rose like fountain sprays of bliss
that ne'er could cloy,
From their little beds of bloom, from the golden gorse and broom,
With a song to God the Giver, o'er that waste of wild perfume;
Blowing from height to height, in a glory of great light,
While the cottage-clustered valleys held the lilac last of night,
So, when dawn is in the skies, in a dream, a dream, I rise,
And I follow my lost boyhood to the heights of Paradise.
Life, thy dawn makes all things new! Hills of Youth, I come to you,
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.