Songs of the Silent World, and Other Poems

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

To your sweet vision. There I stand
Transfigured fair in love's deceit,
And while your soul looks up to mine,
My heart lies at your feet.

Believe me better than my best,
And stronger than my strength can hold,
Until your magic faith transmute
My pebbles into gold.

I'll be the thing you hold me, Dear!—
After I 'm dead, if not before—
Nor, through the climbing ages, will
I give the conflict o'er.

But if upon the Perfect Peace,
And past the thing that was, and is,
And past the lure of voices, in
A world of silences,

A pain can crawl—a little one—
A cloud upon a sunlit land;
I think in Heaven my heart must ache
That you should understand.

A NEW FRIEND.

The sun is sinking on the sacred lands
Wherein the grain ungarnered beckoning stands.

Who loses never finds, nor can, nor may,
The common, human glory of the day.

Close, let us enter, tear-blind as we must;
Reapers, not gleaners of a solemn trust.