Our Lady of the Twilight,
She melts our prison-bars!
She makes the sea forget the shore,
She fills the sky with stars, And stooping over wharf and mill,
Chimney and shed and dome,
Turns them to fairy palaces,
Then calls her children home.
She stoops to bless the stunted tree,
And from the furrowed plain,
And from the wrinkled brow she smooths
The lines of care and pain:
Hers are the gentle hands and eyes
And hers the peaceful breath
That ope, in sunset-softened skies,
The quiet gates of death.
Our Lady of the Twilight,
She hath such gentle hands,
So lovely are the gifts she brings
From out the sunset-lands,
So bountiful, so merciful
So sweet of soul is she;
And over all the world she draws
Her cloak of charity.
THE HILL-FLOWERS
"I will lift up mine eyes to the hills"
I
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Ere I waken in the city—Life, thy dawn makes all things new!
And up a fir-clad glen, far from all the haunts of men,
Up a glen among the mountains, oh my feet are wings again!
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
O mountains of my boyhood, I come again to you,
By the little path I know, with the sea far below,
And above, the great cloud-galleons with their sails of rose and snow;
As of old, when all was young, and the earth a song unsung
And the heather through the crimson dawn its Eden incense flung From the mountain-heights of joy, for a careless-hearted boy,
And the lavrocks rose like fountain sprays of bliss that ne'er could cloy,