Saith the Lord, "Vengeance is mine;
I will repay," saith the Lord;
Ours be the anger divine,
Lit by the flash of His word.
How shall His vengeance be done?
How, when His purpose is clear?
Must He come down from His throne?
Hath He no instruments here?
Sleep not in imbecile trust,
Waiting for God to begin,
While, growing strong in the dust,
Rests the bruised serpent of sin.
Right and Wrong,—both cannot live
Death-grappled. Which shall we see?
Strike! only Justice can give
Safety to all that shall be.
Shame! to stand paltering thus,
Tricked by the balancing odds;
Strike! God is waiting for us!
Strike! for the vengeance is God's.
TOO LATE.
Had we but met in other days,
Had we but loved in other ways,
Another light and hope had shone
On your life and my own.
In sweet but hopeless reveries
I fancy how your wistful eyes
Had saved me, had I known their power
In fate's imperious hour;
How loving you, beloved of God,
And following you, the path I trod
Had led me, through your love and prayers,
To God's love unawares:
And how our beings joined as one
Had passed through checkered shade and sun,
Until the earth our lives had given,
With little change, to heaven.
God knows why this was not to be.
You bloomed from childhood far from me.
The sunshine of the favoured place
That knew your youth and grace.
And when your eyes, so fair and free,
In fearless beauty beamed on me,
I knew the fatal die was thrown,
My choice in life was gone.
And still with wild and tender art
Your child-love touched my torpid heart,
Gilding the blackness where it fell,
Like sunlight over hell.
In vain, in vain! my choice was gone!
Better to struggle on alone
Than blot your pure life's blameless shine
With cloudy stains of mine.
A vague regret, a troubled prayer,
And then the future vast and fair
Will tempt your young and eager eyes
With all its glad surprise.
And I shall watch you, safe and far,
As some late traveller eyes a star
Wheeling beyond his desert sands
To gladden happier lands.
LOVE'S DOUBT.
'Tis love that blinds my heart and eyes,—
I sometimes say in doubting dreams,—
The face that near me perfect seems
Cold Memory paints in fainter dyes.
'Twas but love's dazzled eyes—I say—
That made her seem so strangely bright;
The face I worshipped yesternight,
I dread to meet it changed to-day.
As, when dies out some song's refrain,
And leaves your eyes in happy tears,
Awake the same fond idle fears,—
It cannot sound so sweet again.
You wait and say with vague annoy,
"It will not sound so sweet again,"
Until comes back the wild refrain
That floods your soul with treble joy.
So when I see my love again
Fades the unquiet doubt away,
While shines her beauty like the day
Over my happy heart and brain.
And in that face I see no more
The fancied faults I idly dreamed,
But all the charms that fairest seemed,
I find them, fairer than before.
LACRIMAS.
God send me tears!
Loose the fierce band that binds my tired brain,
Give me the melting heart of other years,
And let me weep again!
Before me pass
The shapes of things inexorably true.
Gone is the sparkle of transforming dew
From every blade of grass.
In life's high noon
Aimless I stand, my promised task undone,
And raise my hot eyes to the angry sun
That will go down too soon.
Turned into gall
Are the sweet joys of childhood's sunny reign;
And memory is a torture, love a chain
That binds my life in thrall.
And childhood's pain
Could to me now the purest rapture yield;
I pray for tears as in his parching field
The husbandman for rain.
We pray in vain!
The sullen sky flings down its blaze of brass;
The joys of life all scorched and withering pass;
I shall not weep again.