The Master's voice was sad:
"I gave My life for thee;
I bore the cross thro' pain and loss,
Thou hast not followed Me."
So fair the lilies' banks,
So bleak the desert way:
The night was dark, I could not mark
Where His blessed footsteps lay.
Fairer the lilied banks
Softer the grassy lea;
"The endless bliss of those who best
Have learned to follow Me!
Canst thou not follow Me?
Hath patient love a power no more
To move thy faithless heart?
Wilt thou not follow Me?
These weary feet of Mine
Have stained, and red the pathway dread
In search of thee and thine."
O Lord! O Love divine!
Once more I follow Thee!
Let me abide so near Thy side
That I Thy face may see.
I clasp Thy pierced hand,
O Thou who diedst for me!
I'll bear Thy cross thro' pain and loss,
So let me cling to Thee.
The Poet's Child
Lines addressed to the daughter of Richard Dalton Williams.
Child of the heart of a child of sweetest song!
The poet's blood flows through thy fresh pure veins;
Dost ever hear faint echoes float along
Thy days and dreams of thy dead father's strains?
Dost ever hear,
In mournful times,
With inner ear,
The strange sweet cadences of thy father's rhymes?
Child of a child of art, which Heaven doth give
To few, to very few as unto him!
His songs are wandering o'er the world, but live
In his child's heart, in some place lone and dim;
And nights and days
With vestal's eyes
And soundless sighs
Thou keepest watch above thy father's lays.
Child of a dreamer of dreams all unfulfilled —
(And thou art, child, a living dream of him) —
Dost ever feel thy spirit all enthrilled
With his lost dreams when summer days wane dim?
When suns go down,
Thou, song of the dead singer,
Dost sigh at eve and grieve
O'er the brow that paled before it won the crown?
Child of the patriot! Oh, how he loved his land!
And how he moaned o'er Erin's ev'ry wrong!
Child of the singer! he swept with purest hand
The octaves of all agonies, until his song
Sobbed o'er the sea;
And now through thee
It cometh to me,
Like a shadow song from some Gethsemane.
Child of the wanderer! and his heart the shrine
Where three loves blended into only one —
His God's, thy mother's, and his country's; and 'tis thine
To be the living ray of such a glorious sun.
His genius gleams,
My child, within thee,
And dim thy dreams
As stars on the midnight sea.