Verses

Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Nourished by peaceful suns and gracious dew, Your sweet youth budded and your sweet lives grew, And all the world seemed rose-beset for you.
The rose of beauty was your mutual dower, The stainless rose of love, an early flower, The stately blooms of ease and wealth and power.
And treading thus on pathways flower-bestrewn, It well might be, that, cold and careless grown, You both had lived for your own joys alone.
But, holding all these fair things as in trust. Gently you walked, still scattering on the dust Of harder roads, which others tread, and must,—
Your heritage of brightness, not a ray Of noontide sought you out, but straight away You caught and halved it with some darker day:
And as the sweet saint's loaves were turned, it is said, To roses, so your roses turned to bread, That hungering souls and weary might be fed.
Dear friends, my poor words do but paint you wrong, Nor can I utter, in one trivial song, The goodness I have honored for so long.
Only this leaf, a single petal flung, One chord from a full harmony unsung, May speak the life-long love that lacks a tongue.
To J. H. and E. W. H. Prelude Commissioned The Cradle Tomb in Westminster Abbey Of such as I have A Portrait When? On the Shore Among the Lilies November Embalmed Ginevra Degli Amieri Easter Lilies Ebb-Tide Flood-Tide A Year Tokens Her Going A Lonely Moment Communion A Farewell Ebb and Flow Angelus The Morning Comes Before the Sun Laborare est Orare Eighteen Outward Bound From East to West Una Two Ways to Love After-Glow Hope and I Left Behind Savoir c'est Pardonner Morning A Blind Singer Mary When Love went Overshadowed Time to Go Gulf-Stream My White Chrysanthemum Till the Day Dawn My Birthday By the Cradle A Thunder Storm Through the Door Readjustment At the Gate A Home The Legend of Kintu Easter Bind-Weed April May Secrets How the Leaves Came Down Barcaroles My Rights Solstice In the Mist Within Menace He That Believeth Shall Not Make Haste My Little Ghost Christmas Benedicam Domino