FLORAL ENVOY.
To F. B.
I. This envoy of flowers, A deputy meet, Your birthday, my friend, Is instructed to greet, And my kindliest wishes To kindly repeat.— Interpret aright In friendship’s white light What the beautiful flowers Would say, could they speak. The sensitive flowers, All voiceless and weak,— Their meaning, involved In their bloom and their breath, Despairing to utter, They haste to their death.
II. The sweet-scented flowers Must droop and decay, But not what their delicate Pantings would say. The messenger fails, But the message survives— An essence, a spirit, That throbs in the lives Of atoms too subtile For kinship with clay.
III. All kindly emotion, That passes the portal Of a heart that is truthful, Is thenceforth immortal: In its mute transmigration From age unto age, In the love of the maid In the thought of the sage, It blossoms afresh, It persists without end, Joins lover to lover, Binds friend unto friend. Then, seeing that flowers And words are but weak, Take care that to-night, You interpret aright What the sensitive flowers Would say could they speak.
ON THE DEATH OF A
VETERAN JOURNALIST.
Great faith was his, a broadened light that shed An unremittant halo on his way, Out-shining moon, and stars, and solar ray, By which his steps through stormy years were led; And while his soul on heavenly manna fed, The well adjusted balance, work and pray, He steadfastly observed from day to day, Assured that faith divorced from work is dead. For man’s behoof the Christian hero wrought, Consistent, fearless, aiming for the right, His silvered locks conspicuous in the fight, Whose purpose was release of limb and thought From all enslaving bonds; kind heart and brave! No rest for him, no rest but in the grave!