Toll at the hour of prime,
Matin and vesper chime,
Loved old bells from the steeple high;
Rolling, like holy waves,
Over the lowly graves,
Floating up, prayer-fraught, into the sky.
Solemn the lesson your lightest notes teach,
Stern is the preaching your iron tongues preach;
Ringing in life from the bud to the bloom;
Ringing the dead to their rest in the tomb.
Peal out evermore—
Peal as ye pealed of yore, Brave old bells, on each holy day.
In sunshine and gladness,
Through clouds and through sadness,
Bridal and burial have both passed away.
Tell us life's pleasures with death are still rife;
Tell us that death ever leadeth to life;
Life is our labor and death is our rest,
If happy the living, the dead are the blest.
—Popular Poetry.
O HOLY CHURCH!
HARRIET M. SKIDMORE.
O holy Church! thy mother-heart
Still clasps the child of grace;
And nought its links of love can part,
Or rend its fond embrace.
Thy potent prayer and sacred rite
Embalm the precious clay,
That waits the resurrection-light—
The fadeless Easter day.
And loving hearts, by faith entwined,
True to that faith shall be,
And keep the sister-soul enshrined
In tender memory;
Shall bid the ceaseless prayer ascend,
To win her guerdon blest;
The radiant day that hath no end,
The calm, eternal rest.