Susan Coolidge - A Few More Verses

Not by strange sudden change and spell,
Baffling and darkening Nature’s face;
Thou takest the things we know so well
And buildest on them thy miracle, —
The heavenly on the commonplace.

The lives which seem so poor, so low,
The hearts which are so cramped and dull,
The baffled hopes, the impulse slow,
Thou takest, touchest all, and lo!
They blossom to the beautiful.

We need not wait for thunder-peal
Resounding from a mount of fire,
While round our daily paths we feel
Thy sweet love and thy power to heal,
Working in us thy full desire.

ORCHID, chance-sown among the moorland heather,
Scarce seen or tasted by the infrequent bee,
Set mid rough mountain growths, lashed by wild weather,
With none to foster thee.

We watch thee fronting all the blasts of heaven,
Thy slender rootlets grappled fast to rock,
Enduring from thy morning to thy even
The buffet and the shock.

Never thy sun vouchsafed a cloudless shining,
Never the wind was tempered to thy pain;
No cloud turned out for thee its silver lining,
No rainbow followed rain.

Nourished mid hardness, learning patience slowly
As hearts must do which know no other food,
Duty and Memory, companions holy,
Shared thy bleak solitude.

Cold touch of Memory, strong chill hand of Duty,
These held thee fast and ruled thee to the end,
Until, with smile mysterious in its beauty,
Came Death, rewarding friend.

Earth gave thee scanty cheer, but earth is ended,
Finished the years of thwarted sacrifice.
We see thee walking forward, well attended,
Led into Paradise!

Heaven is twice Heaven to one who, hungry-hearted,
Goes thither knowing no satisfaction here;
And when we thank the Lord for those departed
In this sure faith and fear,

We think of thee, lonely no more forever,
And tasting, while the eternal years unroll,
That joy of Heaven, which like a flowing river
Satisfies every soul.

WE spend our strength in labor day by day,
We find new strength replacing old alway;
And still we cheat ourselves, and still we say:

“No man would work except to win some prize;
We work to turn our hopes to certainties, —
For gold, or gear, or favor in men’s eyes.”

And all the while the goal toward which we strain —
Up hill and down, in sunshine and in rain,
Heedless of toil, if so we may attain —

Is but a lure, a heavenly-set decoy
To exercised endeavor, full employ
Of every power, which is man’s highest joy.

And work becomes the end, reward the means,
To woo us from our idleness and dreams;
And each is truly what the other seems.

So, Lord, with such poor service as we do,
Thy full salvation is our prize in view,
For which we long, and which we press unto.

Like a great star on which we fix our eyes,
It dazzles from the high, blue distances,
And seems to beckon and to say, “Arise!”

And we arise and follow the hard way,
Winning a little nearer day by day,
Our hearts going faster than our footsteps may;

And never guess the secret sweet device
Which lures us on and upward to the skies,
And makes each toil its own reward and prize.

To give our little selves to thee, to blend
Our weakness with thy strength, O Lord our Friend,
This is life’s truest privilege and end.

THE last sweet flowers are dying,
The last green leaves are red;
The wild geese southward flying,
By law mysterious led,
Scream noisily o’erhead;
The honey-bees have hived them,
The butterflies have shrived them;
All hushed the song and twitter
And flutter of glad wing; —
How could we bear the autumn
If t’were not for the spring?

To see the summer banished,
Nor dare to bid her stay;
To mourn o’er beauty vanished
And joyance driven away;
To mark the shortening day;
To note the sad winds plaining,
The storm cloud and the raining;
To see the frost lance stabbing
Each faint and wounded thing; —
Oh, we should hate the autumn
Excepting for the spring!

To know that life is failing
And pulses beating slow;
To catch the unavailing
Sad monotones of woe
All the earth over go;
To know that snows must cover
The grave of friend and lover,
To hide them from the eyes and hands
That still caress and cling; —
The heart would break in autumn
If there were not a spring!

For every sleep a waking,
For every shade a sun,
A balm for each heart breaking,
A rest for labor done,
A life by death begun;
And so in wintry weather,
With smile and sigh together,
We look beyond the present pain,
The daily loss and sting,
And welcome in the autumn
For the sure hope of spring.

A LITTLE, tender word,
Wrapped in a little rhyme,
Sent out upon the passing air,
As seeds are scattered everywhere
In the sweet summer-time.

A little, idle word,
Breathed in an idle hour;
Between two laughs that word was said,
Forgotten as soon as uttered,
And yet the word had power.

Away they sped, the words:
One, like a wingèd seed,
Lit on a soul which gave it room,
And straight began to bud and bloom
In lovely word and deed.

The other careless word,
Borne on an evil air,
Found a rich soil, and ripened fast
Its rank and poisonous growths, and cast
Fresh seeds to work elsewhere.

The speakers of the words
Passed by and marked, one day,
The fragrant blossoms dewy wet,
The baneful flowers thickly set
In clustering array.

And neither knew his word;
One smiled, and one did sigh.
“How strange and sad,” one said, “it is
People should do such things as this!
I’m glad it was not I.”

And, “What a wondrous word
To reach so far, so high!”
The other said, “What joy ’twould be
To send out words so helpfully!
I wish that it were I.”

COUCHED in the rocky lap of hills,
The lake’s blue waters gleam,
And thence in linked and measured rills
Down to the valley stream,
To rise again, led higher and higher,
And slake the city’s hot desire.

High as the lake’s bright ripples shine,
So high the water goes,
But not a drop that air-drawn line
Passes or overflows;
Though man may strive and man may woo,
The stream to its own law is true.

Vainly the lonely tarn its cup
Holds to the feeding skies;
Unless the source be lifted up,
The streamlet cannot rise:
By law inexorably blent,
Each is the other’s measurement.

Ah, lonely tarn! ah, striving rill!
So yearn these souls of ours,
And beat with sad and urgent will
Against the unheeding powers.
In vain is longing, vain is force;
No stream goes higher than its source.