Through the dark and stormy night Faith beholds a feeble light Up the blackness streaking; Knowing God's own time is best, In a patient hope I rest For the full day-breaking!
But let the good old corn adorn The hills our fathers trod; Still let us, for his golden corn, Send up our thanks to God!
At what point does a man turn into a monster? I don’t believe that it’s when he does horrible things, but when he accepts that he’s able to do them, and that he does them well.
Nothing before, nothing behind; The steps of faith Fall on the seeming void, and find The Rock beneath.
Few have borne unconsciously the spell of loveliness.
With warning hand I mark Time's rapid flight, From Life's glad morning to its solemn night; Yet, through the dear Lord's love, I also show There's light above me by the shade I throw.
We shape ourselves the joy or fear Of which the coming life is made, And fill our Future's atmosphere With sunshine or with shade.
I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.
the joy that you give to others is the joy that comes back to you
A little smile, a word of cheer, A bit of love from someone near, A little gift from one held dear, Best wishes for the coming year. These make a merry christmas!
Flowers spring to blossom where she walks The careful ways of duty; Our hard, stiff lines of life with her Are flowing curves of beauty.
Along the river's summer walk, The withered tufts of asters nod; And trembles on its arid stalk the hoar plum of the golden-rod.
Like warp and woof all destinies Are woven fast, Linked in sympathy like the keys Of an organ vast. Pluck one thread, and the web ye mar; Break but one Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar Through all will run.
Somewhat of goodness, something true From sun and spirit shining through All faiths, all worlds, as through the dark Of ocean shines the lighthouse spark, Attests the presence everywhere Of love and providential care.
Time is hastening on, and we What our fathers are shall be,-- Shadow-shapes of memory! Joined to that vast multitude Where the great are but the good.
With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.
Once more the liberal year laughs out O'er richer stores than gems or gold: Once more with harvest song and shout Is nature's boldest triumph told.
Who sows a field, or trains a flower, Or plants at tree, is more than all.
Low stir of leaves and dip of oars And lapsing waves on quiet shores.
Beauty seen is never lost, God's colors all are fast.
What is really momentous and all-important with us is the present, by which the future is shaped and colored.
His daily prayer, far better understood in acts than in words, was simply doing good.
O Time and change! - with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!
We faintly hear, we dimly see, In differing phrase we pray; But dim or clear, we own in Him The life, the truth, the way.
Round the boles of the pine-wood the ground-laurel creeps, Unkissed of the sunshine, unbaptized of showers, With buds scarcely swelled, which should burst into flowers!
Dear Lord and Father of mankind, Forgive our foolish ways! Re-clothe us in our rightful mind, In purer lives thy service find, In deeper reverence praise
God should be most where man is least: So, where is neither church nor priest, And never rag nor form of creed To clothe the nakedness of need,- Where farmer folk in silence meet,- I turn my bell-unsummoned feet; I lay the critic's glass aside, I tread upon my lettered pride, And, lowest-seated, testify To the oneness of humanity; Confess the universal want, And share whatever Heaven may grant. He findeth not who seeks his own, The soul is lost that's saved alone.
The slave will be free. Democracy in America will yet be a glorious reality; and when the top-stone of that temple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be brought forth with shoutings and cries of grace unto it, when our now drooping Liberty lifts up her head and prospers, happy will he be who can say, with John Milton, "Among those who have something more than wished her welfare, I, too, have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my heirs."
Children have neither past nor future - they rejoice in the present.
If thou of fortune be bereft, and in thy store there be but left two loaves, sell one, and with the dole, buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.
So let it be in God's own might We gird us for the coming fight, And, strong in Him whose cause is ours In conflict with unholy powers, We grasp the weapons he has given,-- The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven.
We live by faith; but Faith is not the slave Of text and legend. Reason's voice and God's, Nature's and Duty's, never are at odds. What asks our Father of His children, save Justice and mercy and humility, A reasonable service of good deeds, Pure living, tenderness to human needs, Reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see The Master's footprints in our daily ways? No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife, But the calm beauty of an ordered life Whose very breathing is unworded praise! - A life that stands as all true lives have stood Firm-rooted in the faith that God is Good.
And close at hand, the basket stood With nuts from brown October's wood. And close at hand, the basket stood With nuts from brown October's wood.
On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll; on plastic clay and leather scroll, man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed, and lo! the Press was found at last!
Let the thick curtain fall;I better know than allHow little I have gained,How vast the unattained.
A grateful loving heart carries with it, under every parallel of latitude, the warmth and light of the tropics. It plants its Eden in the wilderness and solitary place, and sows with flowers the gray desolation of rock and mosses.
I'll lift you and you lift me, and we'll both ascend together.
The simple heart that freely asks in love, obtains.
Autumn, in his leafless bowers, is waiting for the winter's snow.
A true life is at once interpreter and proof of the gospel.
The green earth sends her incense up. From many a mountain shrine; From folded leaf and dewey cup She pours her sacred wine.
Bathsheba! to whom none ever said scat- No worthier cat Ever sat on a mat, Or caught a rat. Requiescat!
The hope of all earnest souls must be realized.
As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth.
The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.
God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day; The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait, Give ermined knaves their hour of crime; Yet have the future grand and great, The safe appeal of Truth to Time!
And step by step, since time began, I see the steady gain of man.
Who never wins can rarely lose, Who never climbs as rarely falls
The garden rose may richly bloom In cultured soil and genial air, To cloud the light of Fashion's room Or droop in Beauty's midnight hair, In lonelier grace, to sun and dew The sweetbrier on the hillside shows Its single leaf and fainter hue, Untrained and wildly free, yet still a sister rose!
For still in mutual sufferance lies The secret of true living; Love scarce is love that never knows The sweetness of forgiving.
What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie?
Yet, in the maddening maze of things, And tossed by storm and flood, To one fixed trust my spirit clings; I know that God is good!
With silence only as their benediction, God's angels come Where in the shadow of a great affliction, The soul sits dumb!
Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward environment, it discovers a deeper and more real love-liness.
We search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From all old flower fields of the soul; And, weary seeker of the best, We come back laden from out quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read.
God blesses still the generous thought,And still the fitting word He speeds,And Truth, at His requiring taught,He quickens into deeds.
The good is always beautiful, the beautiful is good!
For still the new transcends the old In signs and tokens manifold; Slaves rise up men; the olive waves, With roots deep set in battle graves!
To be saved is only this-salvation from our own selfishness.
One brave deed makes no hero.
He is wisest, who only gives, True to himself, the best he can: Who drifting on the winds of praise, The inward monitor obeys. And with the boldness that confuses fear Takes in the crowded sail, and lets his conscience steer.
Beauty is its own excuse.
For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.
Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.
No cloud above, no earth below, A universe of sky and snow.
And peace unweaponed conquers every wrong!
The smile of God is victory.
Thee lift me, and I lift thee, and together we ascend.
Truth should be the first lesson of the child and the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
Small leisure have the poor for grief.
Happy he whose inward ear Angel comfortings can hear, O'er the rabble's laughter; And, while Hatred's fagots burn, Glimpses through the smoke discern Of the good hereafter.
Oh, for boyhood's painless play, sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor's rules, knowledge never learned of schools.
Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West, From North and South, come the pilgrim and guest, When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board The old broken links of affection restored, When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before. What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?
Quite the ugliest face I ever saw was that of a woman whom the world called beautiful. Through its silver veil the evil and ungentle passions looked out, hideous and hateful.
From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk.
In kindly showers and sunshine bud The branches of the dull gray wood; Out from its sunned and sheltered nooks The blue eye of the violet looks.
Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young.
God's providence is not blind, but full of eyes.
Through the open door A drowsy smell of flowers -grey heliotrope And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette Comes fairly in, and silent chorus leads To the pervading symphony of Peace.
No longer forward or behind I look in hope or fear, But grateful, take the good I find, The best of now and here.
Truth is one; And, in all lands beneath the sun, Whoso hath eyes to see may see The tokens of its unity.
Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard! Heap high the golden corn! No richer gift has Autumn poured From out her lavish horn!
Before me, even as behind, God is, and all is well.
A faint blush melting through the light of thy transparent cheek like a rose-leaf bathed in dew.
Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck, And hear a cry from a reeling deck!
Rest if you must, but never quit.
What miracle of weird transforming Is this wild work of frost and light, This glimpse of glory infinite?
Others may sing the song. Others may right the wrong.
Up from the sea, the wild north wind is blowing, under the sky's gray arch. Smiling, I watch the shaken elm boughs, knowing It is the wind of March.
There is religion in everything around us, - a calm and holy religion in the unbreathing things of Nature, which man would do well to imitate.
The Beauty which old Greece or RomeSung, painted, wrought, lies close at home.
Thine to work as well as pray, Clearing thorny wrongs away; Plucking up the weeds of sin, Letting heaven's warm sunshine in.
What, my soul, was thy errand here? Was it mirth or ease, Or heaping up dust from year to year? "Nay, none of these!" Speak, soul, aright in His holy sight, Whose eye looks still And steadily on thee through the night; "To do His will!
The child must teach the man.
This is truth the poet sings . . .
Green calm below, blue quietness above.
And sweet and far as from a star, replied a voice which shall not cease, till drowning all the noise of war, it sings the blessed song of peace
The dreariest spot in all the land to Death they set apart; with scanty grace from Nature's hand, and none from that of Art.
The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.
The tints of autumn...a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.
Formed on the good old plan, A true and brave and downright honest man! He blew no trumpet in the market-place, Nor in the church with hypocritic face Supplied with cant the lack of Christian grace; Loathing pretence, he did with cheerful will What others talked of while their hands were still.
If woman lost us Eden, such As she alone restore it.
Again the blackbirds sings; the streams Wake, laughing, from their winter dreams, And tremble in the April showers The tassels of the maple flowers.
Every chain that spirits wear crumbles in the breadth of prayer.
The sooner we recognize the fact that the mercy of the Almighty extends to every creature endowed with life, the better it will be for us as men and Christians.
God fills the gaps of human need, Each crisis brings its word and deed.
Peace hath higher tests of manhood, than battle ever knew.
Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune's bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all.
Love hath never known a law beyond its own sweet will.
Drop Thy still dews of quietness, Till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of Thy peace.
A charmed life old goodness hath; the tares may perish, but the grain is not for death.
I dimly guess, from blessings known, of greater out of sight.
There's life alone in duty done, And rest alone in striving.
The hope of all who suffer, The dread of all who wrong.
O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother; Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there; To worship rightly is to love each other, Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.
All day the darkness and the cold Upon my heart have lain Like shadows on the winter sky Like frost upon the pane
Behind the cloud the starlight lurks, Through showers the sunbeams fall; For God, who loveth all his works, Has left his Hope with all.
From the death of the old the new proceeds, and the life of truth from the death of creeds.
Man is more than constitutions.
The saddest thing of word or pen, To know the things that might have been.
Leaning on Him, make with reverent meekness His own thy will.
Clothe with life the weak intent, Let me be the thing I meant.
All the windows of my heart I open to the day.
God gives quietness at last.
