Behold the eloquence of love!
A mother for her child distress’d:
A gush of feeling from above
Invades and fills her yearning breast.
That flood of tears,—those wringing hands,
Mark her abandonment of soul,
As, list’ning to the king’s commands,
Her grief refuses all control.
My child! my child!—(tho’ she betray it,)
“The living child” give to my foe!
‘Where is my child?—Oh! do not slay it!
Let me my arms around it throw!’
Thus nature’s impulse bursting forth,
Reveals the mother’s kindred blood,
And stamps upon her claim the truth:
Whilst foil’d the guilty claimant stood.
Such love breathes not in courts, where meet
Soft, studied ease and pamper’d vice:
As soon you’ll find the genial heat
Of nature’s sun in fields of ice!
And that fond soul was one like she
Who bathed the Saviour’s feet with tears:
And hers, like Mary’s ecstasy,
Flows from the influence of prayers:
For, Solomon had sought of God
Not hoards of wealth, nor “length of days:”
But holy unction from His rod,
The bright indwelling of Truth’s rays.
[A View from Mount Carmel.]
And Elijah went up to the top of Carmel; and he cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees. And said to his servant, ‘Go up now, look towards the sea.’ And he went up, and looked, and said, ‘There is nothing.’ And he said, Go again seven times. And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.
—I Kings 18:42,41.
Up Carmel’s wood-clad height an aged prophet slowly creeps,
And sadly drags his weary limbs o’er rocks and mossgrown steeps.
He bows himself upon the earth, “his face between his knees,”
And thus he to his servant speaks, beneath the lofty trees.