RESIGNATION. THERE is no flock, however watched and tended The air is full of farewells to the dying, The heart of Rachel, for her children crying, Let us be patient! These severe afflictions But oftentimes celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise. We see but dimly through the mists and vapors; Amid these earthly damps, What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps. There is no Death! What seems so is transition. This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, She is not dead,-the child of our affection,— Where she no longer needs our poor protection, And Christ himself doth rule. In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, Day after day we think what she is doing Year after year, her tender steps pursuing, Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken, Not as a child shall we again behold her; In our embraces we again enfold her, But a fair maiden, in her Father's mansion, And beautiful with all the soul's expansion And though at times impetuous with emotion The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean, We will be patient, and assuage the feeling We may not wholly stay; By silence sanctifying, not concealing, The grief that must have way. THE BUILDERS. 327 THE BUILDERS. ALL are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time; Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme. Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best; And what seems but idle show Strengthens and supports the rest. For the structure that we raise, Our to-days and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these; Leave no yawning gaps between ; Think not, because no man sees, Such things will remain unseen. In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the Gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen Else our lives are incomplete, |