"There the wicked cease from troubling,
And the weary are at rest,"—
a beautiful, thought, which Tennyson has put bodily into his "Queen of the May," where, as here, the words sob like a child sobbing itself to sleep when its mother is dead and missed.
"There the prisoners are at ease together;
They hear not the voice of the taskmaster."
And to prisoners of hope, how healing such words are, and full of balm! But to us who have known not the blinding grief of prisoners, the poetry of the thought is "rainy sweet."
"My roarings are poured out like water."
"Men which are crushed before the moth!"
"For man is born unto trouble
As the sparks to fly upward."
"The counsel of the froward is carried headlong:
They meet with darkness in the daytime,
And grope at noonday as in the night."
"For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field,
And the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee;
And thou shalt know that thy tent is in peace."
Can one recall a description of peace more searching and ample, not to say fraught with more tender suggestion?