THE RHYTHM UNIVERSAL

Give me thy music, O most musical One,

The rhythm that rolls from yonder cycling sun;

Yea more, as heart and soul of all that’s good,

Thy nature gave in vaster plenitude;

Nor time will ever be when thy glad stars

Will cease to sing as one in rhythmic bars;

Nor conscious sons of God go shouting joy;

Nor woodland birds of song their loved employ.

It’s in the very heart of things;

It’s in our bounds and sweeps and swings;

It’s in the tree and rose that springs—

All Nature sings—— and—— sings.

The heart of man, his coursing blood through veins;

The very breath of life, his thoughts and reins;

His dreams, devotions, deeds, his all, O soul,

Or great or small beneath divine control.

The gracious seasons roll in mighty numbers;

The snow, the sleet but falls, that He who slumbers

Not may again awake the earth to life

And stay, for man and all, the winter’s strife.

The raging storm, the great earthquake and war

Are music bound, if we but see afar;

From heart of heav’n to heart of hell—ah yes;

The prince of darkness is beset, not less—

’Tis bars and feet, far-reaching leaps and falls,

Through light not seen in His momentous calls.

Consider Job—upright but proud—at last,

By grinding fate, by every woe held fast,

He turned to highest hills and King of all;

And never more asked he, “why such a fall?”

It was the rhythm of God through stops of sin;

’Twas His own anthems deep, without, within.

Our Pilgrim fathers, banished by the fates,

Brought out of many ills the United States;

And through each crisis great of all known time,

’Tis God in love; ’tis music full sublime.

At last the Lamb and Lion in song shall join;

The Child and Wolf eternal riches coin;

The Night shall sing to Day, and Day to Him,

Who receives the plaudits of the seraphim.

THE STONE CROSSES
AND THE FAIRIES

(In Patrick County, Virginia, little stone crosses have been found and are yet obtainable. Jewelers of Roanoke and Martinsville, Va., assure inquirers that the Virginia “Fairy” or “Lucky” stones, discovered nowhere else in the world, have been a puzzle to scientists, and are being worn by some of the crowned heads of Europe. A bulletin of the U. S. Geological Survey speaks of them as “the most curious mineral found in the United States,” and calls them Staurolite or Fairy Stones.)

In Virginia’s historic hills around a hallowed spot,

There was born a mystic legend which ne’er shall be forgot;

A story true to Nature and to One without a blot—

The divinest story of old!

For glory bright is round it, which has softened many a heart,

A tale of wise and saintly ones, in universal art;

A story mightiest with men now and ever mighty part

It played in the races of old.

We yet believe that angels must have wept and good men sighed,

When Gallilee’s great Son with hateful spite was crucified;

But who would ever dream the fairy spirits were allied

In Heaven’s great scheme of old?

Yet when these blithesome fays were dancing by a mountain spring,

Ere the days of Pocahontas and Powhattan, the fearless King,

In union with the naiads, an elfin, swift of wing,

Came weeping from the East, of old.

The story sad he told of Christ, the Saviour, and His Cross;

Then joy and laughter sudden ceased, and grieving for their loss,

They shed their tears upon the pebbles and on the velvet moss—

A heaven moved grief of old.

And lo, when they had flown from the enchanted spring and ground,

Just where the tears had fallen on the pebbles lying round,

The Fairy stony crosses by the thousand there were found,

Sweet Nature’s crosses of old.

Note the crosses in this clod of earth.

Photographed in Patrick County, Va.