“FOREVER WITH THE LORD.”
Montgomery had the Ambrosian gift of spiritual song-writing. Whatever may be thought of his more ambitious descriptive or heroic pages of verse, and his long narrative poems, his lyrics and cabinet pieces are gems. The poetry in some exquisite stanzas of his “Grave” is a dream of peace:
There is a calm for those who weep,
A rest for weary mortals found;
They softly lie and sweetly sleep
Low in the ground.
The storms that wreck the winter's sky
No more disturb their deep repose
Than summer evening's latest sigh
That shuts the rose.
But in the poem, “At Home in Heaven,” which we are considering—with its divine text in i Thess. 4:17—the Sheffield bard rises to the heights of vision. He wrote it when he was an old man. The contemplation so absorbed him that he could not quit his theme till he had composed twenty-two quatrains. Only four or five—or at most only seven of them—are now in general use. Like his “Prayer is the Soul's Sincere Desire,” they have the pith of devotional thought in them, but are less subjective and analytical.
Forever with the Lord!
Amen, so let it be,
Life from the dead is in that word;
'Tis immortality.
Here in the body pent,
Absent from Him I roam,
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent
A day's march nearer home.
My Father's house on high!
Home of my soul, how near
At times to faith's foreseeing eye
Thy golden gates appear.
I hear at morn and even,
At noon and midnight hour,
The choral harmonies of heaven
Earth's Babel tongues o'erpower.
The last line has been changed to read—
Seraphic music pour,
—and finally the hymnals have dropped the verse and substituted others. The new line is an 587 / 523 improvement in melody but not in rhyme, and, besides, it robs the stanza of its leading thought—heaven and earth offsetting each other, and heavenly music drowning earthly noise—a thought that is missed even in the rich cantos of “Jerusalem the Golden.”