Lovingly the stars still shine,
While the tide’s wild song of gladness
Seems to bear her voice divine.
Oft in dreams I see my lost one,
Hear her voice as soft and low
As a strain of far-off music;—
But the dawn brings back my woe.
Bowed with unutterable grief,—grief that was so severe that it choked back every tear into my heart,—I buried my head in my arms to shut out both sight and sound, and wept as tearless grief alone can weep. The angel-images of the two that had gone Home, forever to await the happier marriage in eternal union there, I saw looking down compassionately, while the two mourners left behind were constantly reaching upwards toward those loved ones beyond their ken in the dim unknown, and sometimes almost touching the finger-tips of the hands unseen! Yes; and the music! I heard it over, and over, and over again, sometimes near, sometimes far, always sweet and tremulous, sometimes sounding in my ear, sometimes dying away and echoing back from the dome of that Home above.
When again my fevered eyes looked upon the page, I wondered if it could be that these embodiments of both verse and music could be changing so rapidly, or if the change had been going on constantly without my notice. Both transformed—I know not now what to call them—had now become so small that I could scarcely distinguish their bodies through the spirit-like halo. And that halo every moment grew more and more human—no, not human; but, though an embodying spirit, it grew more and more like a disembodied human soul. Less and less visible became the body of each, more and more like a human soul became the halo of each as the first wove itself away into the final web.—
Oh, my heart is sad and lone