POETRY.
AN ANTHEM OF DECEMBER.
ONCE at Christmas, in a far-back midnight, To the raised imagination of a child Reached the cadences of distant music, Strange, familiar, pleading, sweet, and wild.
Seemed it then the song of hovering seraphs Telling, once more, to a world of pain,
Tidings wonderful, erst, startled shepherds, Watching 'midst the pastures of the plain.
Died the dream, but oftentimes its echo Held the listening fancy as of yore, And a tone intense of charmed elation On the rush of its illusion bore.
In the fires of youth—the sanguine fervours, In the sobered visions of the man, In the stately pathos of remembrance, Murmurs of its inspiration ran.
In the boundless silence of the moorland, Where the woods brood, where the rivers sigh, 'Mid the turmoil of the swarm-swept city, Came that deep, unearthly, inward cry.
And it called the pilgrim of the lowland To the heights beyond the belts of pine, And it roused the thinkers apathetic With its clarion of desires divine.
'Twas the Angel of the Annunciation Bade the lowly heart to love's high throne ! 'Twas the radiant Angel of the garden, Rolling from the stifled life, the stone !
Here, to-day, where the vast blue Atlantic Pours the armies of its waves amain, Through the exultation of their tumult Still I hear it, the transcendent strain !
Purer than the notes that fill the mornings When the winds of spring begin to blow, Soft and solemn as the starry whispers That are breathed about the peaks of snow, Evermore, 0 voice of the ideal, Through life's commonplace and coarseness ring, Comfort, peace, light, courage, exaltation, To the pained strife of existence bring !
JOSEPH TRUMAN.
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