To climb the distant sun clad hills
Where Pleasure, from her vintage sweet,
For each, a golden chalice fills—To
stand beneath the shining arch,
By rainbow-tinted promise spanned:—
What fine advance, in Life’s grand march,
Our strong, young courage planned.
But ah! in life’s late afternoon,
No worldly wealth, no laurels won—
I grieve that time has fled so soon
With so much planned, left all undone;
The barren years, like surf-worn sand,
With glints of sun and shadow flecked,
Are strewn with fragments as the strand
And show where Hope’s rich cargoes wrecked.
No mould of sloth lies o’er the years—
No waste of dissipation’s fire
Is smoldering in regrets and tears,
Yet youth’s fond dream—intense desire
A cruel fate has still denied;
Or, was it Heaven’s kind decree
That set that cherished wish aside
To bring a richer gift to me?
There’s naught in God’s infinitude
Of gifts for us, like home and wife,
And happy, blessed motherhood,
The crowning gift of woman’s life.
These gifts transmute to dear delight
Each humble task, all toil and care,
And keep home’s sacred altar bright
With love’s sweet offerings there.
All these, and one more gift is mine
That stirs with joy my brooding thought—
A friendship rare and true as thine,
A chain—all precious links—inwrought
With sacred trust. Oh hush, my heart,
No more in bitterness complain:
Thou wouldst not with thy treasures part
Youth’s wildest dream of power to gain.
Hill-Crest Home.
TO MRS. A. FOSKETT POTTER.
The picture, you rave over there on the wall,
Is weak by the one hung in memory’s hall.
While that one is held by the fetters of art
To rules of perspective—can only give part,
The other has range over hill-top and dell,
From the vaulted blue sky to the depths of the well—
Can even give sense of refreshing from this—
Show stars gleaming thro’ from its seeming abyss.
It has other delights, never reached with a brush,
The ravishment held in the notes of a thrush
(The sweetest voiced bird of the singing-bird throng)
Reverberant groves all a-thrill with its song.
Then the river, that knit a bright edge on the farm,
Enmantled with vapor—etherial charm!
As if dawn and the dew, meeting, playfully kissed
When the sun peeping over dissolved them in mist;
Like a gauzy, white chrisom cloth lightly it lies
O’er the rosy-faced morning, new-born of the skies.
Now, mellow and sweet as the music of dream,
Or a softly touched lute, comes the song of the stream;
Enchanted I listen, ay, listen and gaze
Till sound seems enwreathed with this luminous haze
That’s woven for nymphs, of the sunshine and spray;
And veiled in these light robes they mingle in play
Till on bloom scented breezes they’re floated away.
I promised to tell of my humble old home,
But my pen wanders off where my feet used to roam,
So the home of my childhood I picture for you
Must cover the rambles “my infancy knew.”
Come, stand ’neath that maple with me, if you will:
The manse, looking south from the brow of the hill,
Has the River, the valley, “The Island” in view—
(O! if mem’ry’s bright search-light could give it to you,
And you, with my childhood’s own vision, could see
The love-lighted beauty, that glowed there for me!)
While eastward the valley-farms glint thro’ the trees,
Whose grandeur had saved them to the thither-most shore,
And hills, as a back ground of beauty for these,
A richly-robed forest in stateliness bore;
And this, to my child fancy, held up the skies
Where the dawn, stealing in thro’ their bright rosy dyes,
Peeped in at my window to waken me when
The sun-gleams, aflash in the dew-spangled glen,
Out rivaled Golconda in jewels and gold—
When lambkins went frolicking down from the fold
To nip the soft grass or to drink from the brook—Ah,
there was a spot, just beyond where they drank,
Where the brook cut the hill for its opposite bank,
And nestled above was a shadowy nook
With a rustic root-bench which a wind-warring tree
Had thrown out to anchor its hold on the hill:
There, glad as the laughter of innocent glee,
Came the musical tinkle and play of the rill,
A melody sweet, to that ærie of mine,
Where, safe from intrusion as cliff dweller, I
Heard, fresh from her lips, Nature’s message divine,
Told sweetly, thro’ beauties, of earth and the sky.
An old fallen tree made a foot-bridge across
That led to this hiding—this sanctum of mine.
Bright fern fringes bordered its soft rug of moss—
A wild grape had thatched with a clambering vine
That hid for my coming bright sparkles of dew.
O, bower of beauty, so temptingly cool!
’Twas the home of the fairies and they only knew
The hours spent there that were stolen from school.
The brook-bordered fields of that moderate farm
Had each, for my heart, individual charm.—
The skies that bent over had glories unknown
To all other lands, even Italy’s own.
More golden its sunsets than any since seen:—
Its shadowy woodland, so rich in its green,
Had springs purling down in a dusky ravine:
There oft at the fount, where the waters distilled,
My leaf-fashioned cup I have held to be filled.
O, nectar twould be if again I could drink
Of the sparkles that fell there like pearls from its brink,
As it tinkled down sweetly from its rock-basined source
To join with its peers in their river-ward course.
In those shadowy depths, hid away from the world,
Most delicate forms of the fronds were uncurled:
Spring-beauties, anemonies, clematis white,
With violets, bluebells and maiden-hair fern,—
There were some of them ever to keep the spot bright,
To waft me good-bye and to greet my return.
Then the hillside, our play-ground—I never can tell
Its riches of beauty in bower and dell.
The sunrise would kiss with its first ruddy glow
Then slip to the river that murmured below
And lighting its ripples with flashes of gold
It made all the valley a joy to behold.
That River! It ever kept time with my heart,—
Grew into my soul, of my life was a part.
It echoed my laughter, was sad when I wept—
When drowsy it lulled me with song till I slept.—
’Twas playmate and teacher, companion and friend,
From the “deep-hole” that mirrored the trees at “the bend”
To that spot of enchantment, where the willows bent low
To whisper their love. There the river went slow
As if hushing its wonted, wild, rollicking flow
To linger and listen—the story, so sweet,
’Twould have all the zephyr-swayed branches repeat.
But the loveliest view from the home on the hill—
The one that could ever enrapture and thrill,
Was a calm summer eve with the stars beaming thro’
From the unclouded depths of the fathomless blue,—
“The city of God” filling vastness above,
Each mansion aglow with the light of His love.
Enhancing the beauty a broad, rising moon,
That followed a day with a languorous noon—
A day that in going left the sun-door ajar,
When a breeze, that was born of a rain-cloud afar,
Had stolen thro, softly, with the great evening star,
And whispered a vow to the languishing flowers
To bring them, ere morning, refreshing in showers.
Then the murmur of waters—the ripple in view,
The robings of Nature, aglitter with dew,
The sway of the trees, and the rose-petals strewn—
The kiss of the breeze, that has breath of the June.
Just sit in our group on the balcony there
And dream of this scene, inexpressibly fair
(Remember this gable looks square at the noon):
How the gateways of glory thrown wide by the moon
Could pour their white floods on the beautiful scene—
What charm in the mingling of shadow and sheen!
The river went north in its tortuous trend
And wound thro’ the valley with many a bend.
This lake-like expanse, deep and smoothe, as you see,
Lying right in the pathway, ’tween Luna and me,
On an evening like this seemed a great burnished glass.
The Island shore here, had a margin of grass—
The round little cove cutting into its edge
Grew ferns on its banks and was dotted with sedge.
In the far-reaching shadows of lofty old trees
This part of the Island was hid from the noon;
Its quiet invited to slumberous ease;
Here the River flowed gently as Afton or Doon.
Kind Nature had woven a pleachy thick screen
Of forest and vines that were standing between,
And made this remote from the town and its mills.
The zephyr-stirred leaves with their mystical chant—
That soft, lulling murmur, that muffles and stills—
Hushed the tumult and jar of the noisy “old plant”
And made this a spot ever calm and serene,
Fit temple for worship, embosomed in green.
Here, the river seemed charmed by some mythical lore—
It loitered along, seemed reluctant to pass,
While eddying wavelets crept up on the shore
And kissed, with their cool lips, the velvety grass.
On, slowly it flows until reaching a place
Where a glimpse may be caught of the swift running “Race;”
There it breaks into foam with a current so wild—
They rush to the meeting like mother and child.
With a plaint in its story that the mother-stream thrills,
Race babbles and tells how it toiled at the mills—Was
prisonned and held, by the strength of the flume—
Was power that wrought on the spindle and loom.
Received in her bosom with loving embrace
They mingle their songs, then, the River and Race,
Delighting us all with their musical tones,
While silver-capped ripples go dancing o’er stones.
* * * * *
Aye, “Hill-crest” had beauty beyond all compare,
But words can ne’er picture how wondrously fair
For one whose misfortune ’tis not to have seen
That river—that hillside—the trees in their green—
Heard the music of waters, o’er pebbles at play,
Or, lapping ’mong rocks and then swirling away—
The brook leaping down to be lost in the stream
As womanhood merges our girl-hood’s young dream—If
her childhood’s bare feet have ne’er pressed that cool sod
Where first I loved Nature, thro’ Nature her God.
[Illustration: HILL-CREST HOME.]
Lillies of the Valley.
O, pearly, waxen, lilly bells!
Glad the tale your coming tells—
Blithest time, of all the year,
Happy, blooming spring is here
With lillies-of-the-valley.
Shining like the precious gem,
Divers bring from ocean’s floor;
God in blessing scattered them
Blooming by the humblest door;
Springing in some sheltered nook,
Peeping by a mouldering wall,
Nodding by a babbling brook,
Purest, sweetest flowers of all,
Are lillies-of-the-valley.
Hidden from life’s cares and frets
Is the loved embowered spot
Sacred to our floral pets—
Lillies and forget-me-not;
Tho’ the poet’s fondest dream
Wreaths about the violet,
With the morning’s dew agleam,
Lovlier and sweeter yet
Are lillies-of-the-valley.
Roses fade and fall apart—
Lose their beauty with their bloom,
In the lillies perfect heart
Lingers long its sweet perfume;
Mem’ries dear we’ll ne’er forget,
With their tender thrills of bliss,
Hover round the mignonette,
Yet, a charm supreme to this,
Have lillies-of-the-valley.
Queens of color, tall and proud
Bloom among the asphodels,
But of all that lauded crowd
None so loved as lilly bells!
Pansy bright with dreamy eyes
Seems acquaint with mystic lore,
Whispers “hope” when sorrow sighs,
Yet, we love the lillies more,
Sweet lillies-of-the-valley.
They will breathe the tender thought
Sympathy would fain reveal,
But, with love’s fond message fraught,
Half their charm is to conceal.
Lillies of the Valley.
Rosebud boldly tells the tale
Cupid sent it to confess—
With the fragrance they exhale
Lillies whisper,—“You may guess.”
Pearly Shells.
All the rainbow hues are hiding
In the pearly shells of white,
But their beauties are depending
On the mystic powers of light;—
Going, coming, like the blushes
On a modest maiden’s cheek,
As her heart-throb quick confesses
What her lips would never speak.
Husband, there’s a heart that’s loving
With devotion pure and deep;
If you’d know its fullest blessing,
If the treasure you would keep,
You must flash the light upon it,
Beaming out from loving eyes;
Then, as shell, reflecting sunlight,
It will glow with lovely dyes.
All within and all about it
Soon will catch the won’drous charm,
By reflection and absorption
Home will aye be bright and warm;
But if left alone in darkness,
Through a life of gloom and night,
Like the sea-shell, pure and pearly,
It will be but cold and white.
Courage.
Now with zeal that will not falter
Rally once again for Right,
Trusting ever and believing
God is all supreme in might.
Let us work—give earnest effort,
Ere the day in darkness set,
Work with faith and love untiring—
He will crown our labors yet.
Though allies of rum are legion,
Fear no evil may betray,
For He’s given angels o’er us
Charge to keep us in the way.
We shall “tread upon the adder,”
If our faith be strong in God;
Aye, “the dragon we shall trample”
If with “Gospel Peace” we’re shod.
Trailing Arbutus.
_Emblematic Flower of Michigan W. C. T. U._
In Flora’s dominion no flower’s so fitting
To symbol our union of labor and love;
Not tender and petted, a hot-house exotic,
It lives when the tempest is raging above.
Sweet forest-born flower! ’Twas Michigan’s dower
When Nature apportioned her gifts that are rare—
So lovely, yet lowly! Affection, that’s holy,
Seems blent with its fragrance and breathing a prayer
That the loved may be borne in the arms of His care.
Its coming we hail as a promise of blessing—
That chains shall be riven, a glory be born;
Its delicate hue is a hint of our mission—
The soft, rosy blush that first tinges the morn,
When hope is awakening and gloom is receding—
A pressage of light that shall gladden the world,
When darkness has fled and the cloud-rack is lifted
And day’s golden banners on the hills are unfurled.
It needs not the florist, with art and punctilio
Nor asks for the smiles of the sun-lighted skies,
But richest and brightest, ’tis found in seclusion,
In depths of the woodland where dark shadow lies;
Far up on the highlands, or creeping on lowlands,
’Mong towering oaks or ’neath whispering pines,
The shell-tinted bloom of our sweet, trailing laurel
The lowliest objects with beauty entwines.
’Tis Purity’s emblem—Priscilla’s loved flower!
Oft springing in fenlands where dark, sodden mould
Grows vile-odored herbage, e’en poison-fed night-shade,
Yet, pure there, its waxen, sweet blossoms unfold.
Thus white-ribbon bands, thro’ the moral morasses,
Tho’ threading the paths which the vilest are in,
With purity throned in the soul of all action,
May labor ’mid evils, unsullied by sin.
Ah! truly, no flower in Flora’s dominion,
Can symbol the virtues and graces like this—
’Tis faith and endurance in winter’s wild tempest,
While gentleness tenderly speaks in the kiss
That comes in its fragrance, on fairy winged zephyr
And hope, in the buds swelling under the snow,
Is whispering of joys when the full opened blossoms
Shall herald the summer, with roseate glow.
We’ll gather it in, from our own native woodlands,
And wreathe, with its beauty, our altar of prayer;
The holiest thought, with its ambient odor,
Is stirred, as with incense, afloat on the air.
We love it!—we love it! our sweet trailing laurel,
And make it our emblem in labor for God—
For home, with its blessings and love-lighted altar,
And land of our birth, with its trial-tracked sod.
Encouragement.
What wealth of enjoyment a sentence may hold
That flows in a rill of encouraging words!
The heart’s weary wings with new strength will unfold,
While quick resolution all feebleness girds.
The sunset may brighten—outrival the dawning,
If sympathy’s warm touch the drooping life thrills;
Tho’ autumn has put out her gold-tassled awning
And mantled with haze all the woodlands and hills—
Tho’ the vintage hath yielded the first of its wines—
Tho’ shadows lie eastward in wavering lines,
And evening has whispered the low uttered warning—
“The glories of Day have all drifted afar”—
The spirit will rally encouraged by love.
E’en twilight may deepen, if only this star
Shall gleam with its vestal light brightly above,
We’ll work thro’ life’s gloaming, till angels unbar
The orient gates of Eternity’s morning.
Faith.
O, by and by the sun will shine again—
Will throw glad light on hill, and field, and plain;
The earth will smile ’neath Plenty’s joyous reign,
And we shall know that “God remembers the world.”
Aye, by and by the clouds will roll away
And then a greater boon, a golden day
Will seem, because we’ve known a gloomy May
When Doubt, o’er brooding, shadowed all our world.
Let Hope’s bright sunshine gladden every hour,
E’en tho’ the skies with angry tempests lower;
Believe, beyond, above, a higher Power
Doth watch and guard, with loving, care the world.
Shrink not nor e’er, with dread, thy part delay;
With faith and courage meet each coming day—
Let duties well performed pave all thy way,
Thus make a royal pathway thro’ the world.
Tho’ sorrows should be thick along thy path,
Remember none are sent to thee in wrath;
Love fires the bolt that makes the lightning scath—
A law that gives a brighter, better world.
With frowning face Calamity may come,
Ay, strike a hemisphere with terror dumb,
But let no boding fear thy faith benumb,
For He who made, in wisdom rules the world.
Tho’ skies and seas their floods together roll—
Tho’ earth should pass, a shriveled scroll,
His care is over each immortal soul—
He’ll gather us to His eternal world.
Nirvana.
Possession blest of that Celestial sphere
Beyond the reach of hope and fear;
Salvation’s port—Elysian shore
Where souls remain, forevermore,
In blissful calm, disturbed by naught
Evolved by ranging, restless Thought,
And where Eternal arms of Peace
Enfolding, give secure release
From chains that bind, to Death and Sin—
A severance from the What-has-been—
An end of seeming endless range;
No farther transmigrating change,
But REST of soul, that’s sweet, supreme,
Beyond, the touch of Life’s wild dream:
A draught that quenches all desire—
Extinguishes Ambition’s fire,
And leave, an essence, pure, divine,
That shall with Brama ever shine,
Quiescent in that blest repose
To which the wise Guatama rose.
Heredity.
Thro’ your Eden creeps the Serpent
Luring to the paths of sin:
In your own, weak self-indulgence
Life accursing crimes begin:
Aye, you blight your own with evils
Yielding to the tempter’s sway,
Hushing conscience, Sin imputing
To Eve’s early, shadowed day.
Science swings her torch above you
From her lofty templed heights—
Paths, by which the Race climb upward,
By command of God she lights;
Can you, with His laws before you,
Violate your sacred trust?
Dare you taint the soul you’re moulding
For Eternity, with lust?
Holy is your mission, mother,
Lives confided to your care—
Shall they, of your dissipations
Foulest scars forever bear?
Hush the voice of self-indulgence—
Thrust the serpent from your heart,
That he lure not to partaking
Of the sins you may impart.
While the fires of Being kindle
At your own life’s flame and glow
And the mother love is springing
From this holy interflow—
While the crimson tide is pulsing
Thro’ but one heart, for the two,
Stain not thou, with sin, the fountain
That the new life passes through.
Pebbles.
Pebbles, thrown upon the shore
By a storm-stirred wild commotion,
Tell of tumult, crash and roar,
When wild furies lashed the ocean.
Pebbles, gathered from the shore
When the waves were only sighing,
Tell of balmy evening strolls
When the sunset fires were dying.
Pebbles—some of brightest hue—
That were snatched by dimpled fingers
When the waves came rolling in—
Loving thought around them lingers.
Pebbles, in life’s pathway lie
That the careless roughly tread,
While another passing by
Finds them gems that lustre shed.
Pebbles—scan them—cast away
Wave-worn, rounded bits of stone,
But if one hath lighting ray,
Keep the treasure as thine own.
* * * * *
When the heart is sorrow-laden
Seek the spirit’s shrine of prayer,
Jesus there will meet and bless you
And you’ll leave your burdens there.
* * * * *
As the blessed, healing mentha
Holds for mortal pains nepentha,
So hath sympathy the art
To soothe the bruises of the heart.
* * * * *
From each act, however small,
Some result must ever fall;
Drop a pebble in the wave
Distant shores its ripples lave.
* * * * *
Give gladness to childhood! ’twill brighten life’s years;
Pour hydromel for it, unmingled with tears,
So fondly, caressingly, memory clings
To youth’s every joy, forgetting its stings.
* * * * *
Experience teaches some lessons of worth—
That wealth is not always of lordliest birth,
That duty makes labor, tho’ humble, sublime—
That crucial trial gives strength to the soul:—
There’s no royal road to Life’s coveted goal,
Earth’s throngs must all pass the same doorway of Time.
* * * * *
If Heaven’s light beam on your tears,
Hope’s bright bow will span the cloud,
While God’s own promise, calming fears,
Will lift the soul by sorrow bowed.
* * * * *
Mystery deep, thy doors unbar,
And let us look within!—
Thought goes ranging far—afar,
On webs our fancies spin.
* * * * *
The life I live is not my own—
’Tis subterfuge and dross,
The yearning soul makes hidden moan,
With secret sense of loss.
* * * * *
O, dear Savior, I am weary—
Let me rest my soul with Thee!
Mansions bright, Thou art preparing—
Wilt thou, Jesus, welcome me?
* * * * *
For the bright, warm joys, once cherished,
There’s a withered rose and a brown, sere leaf;
Ah! dear were the hopes that perished,
Yet there’s wealth of life, in the golden sheaf.
* * * * *
When a gleam of the sun, thro’ a rift in the storm,
Throws a light on our path, that was shadowed before,
We look to the cloud, for the beautiful form
Of the bow, that is promise to us, evermore.
* * * * *
The rose is girt with thorns about,
The berries sweet, with briars—
Thus Fate doth ever hedge us from
Our heart’s supreme desires.
* * * * *
Tossing, rolling, restless sea,
Picture thou of Life to me—Shadow-clouds
now floating o’er,
Foam and drift-wood on the shore:—
Depths of dark and billowy waves,
Wrecking hopes and hollowing graves—
Breaking on the beach in moans,
Seem thy cavern’s echoed groans.
Prosperous winds, and thou wilt bear,
On thy heaving bosom fair,
Snowy sails, with treasures laden
From the distant, sun-kissed Aden,—
Costly fabrics—richest stores,
For their own, dear, home-lit shores,
Where Love’s altars brightly burn,
While she waits their glad return.
* * * * *
In all this beauteous world of ours
What gift, of Love, so sweet as flowers!
* * * * *
O, sweet is the fountain of soothing
That ever is found in His Word—
Drink deeply when heart-wounds are bleeding
And the peace of the spirit is stirred.
Words.
O, words may be loving and mellow in tone,
Sweet as the dew on the flowers of Hermon,
Gently imparting a blessing their own,
Precious with promise, as Olivet’s sermon.
Words may be careless, and cruel and coarse—
Be tauntingly hurled, or so bitterly spoken,
Resistless as lightning’s destroying force,
They scar with their scathing the heart they have broken.
Words may have edge that is keener than steel—
May pierce with their points like the swift-flying arrow;
They hurt with these stings while the victim will feel,
Then tear through the heart like a torturing harrow.
Words may be venomed with malice and spite,
May wither with scorn, with contempt and derision—
Be dreaded like adders when coiling to bite
Or hiss out their poison in whispered suspicion.
Aye, words may be vile as a basilisk’s breath—
A falsehood the germ—an ovum of evil,
Impregnate with calumny’s virus innate,
Then heated and hovered by envy and hate;
Thus “brooded by serpents,” like the monster medieval,
Come forth with his powers of blasting with death.
But words that are warmed in the sunlight of love
Will soothe with their feeling a brother’s affliction;
’Tis the Spirit from heaven that comes like a dove,
So gently descending in sweet benediction.
’Tis blessed receiving what kindness imparts,
How trifling so ever the token,
Thrice blessed, the giving of solace to hearts
That words of injustice have blighted and broken.
There’s comfort and balm for life’s various smarts
In words of true sympathy, tenderly spoken.
Mother.
Oh! mother, mine, mother, mine, come to me now,
With a touch of thy hand sweep the care from my brow;
Oh, come, on the wings of the silences come,
Dear mother, my own, as you reigned in our home.
Oh! mother, mine, mother, mine, come now at eve.
I sit in the gloaming, in loneliness grieve;
The world is so selfish, so cold and unkind,
Sweet solace for pain in thy love I would find.
Oh! mother, mine, mother, mine, hear me, I pray!
In the silence of night, blot the sorrows of day;
And point me away from the earth and its care.
To the beautiful dwelling—that mansion so fair,