POETRY.
AN AUTUMN EVENING. GRAY is the sky, and gray the fading land, And a thin rim of starved gray fainting light On the bleak ridges flickers, that ring round
This pastoral hollow with its long green lanes, Its ashen shadows, and mute, slumbering farms; Slow through the meadows steals the leaden stream, From the ploughed upland to the rectory elms Dumb floats the rooky boat dejectedly As though in the surprised and stricken air A hand invisible for silence waved; About the lonesome grange upon the hill The rising wind of twilight roams and sighs, Searching for something lost or some one gone, And on a low branch of the nearest pine Plains autumn's trembling bird disconsolate.
This saddened vale was once a shrine of light, A radiant figure ranged its solitude, And filled the quiet with intensity.
Here the most heavenly of the mornings dawned, Through placid splendours, in the heights of eve, The chanting dusky choirs sailed stately home, And all the bashes brimmed with bubbling song.
Still,—life's eclipse cannot mean endless night; The love, the tenderness, the lofty trust, The fair imaginations that all made The secret joy of the wide simple world Fall not to mouldered ruin like the woods, Nor perish as a drifted cloud that melts Upon the blanched horizon's outmost verge, But breathe and soar and brighten, strong and free, Untroubled, pure, immortal, near or far, There where we know that the Redeemer liveth, And the lost angels of our heart see God.
JOSEPH TRUMAN..
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