THE DEATH OF LOVE.

O DEATH, supremely terrible

In any shape or form—

In peace, or in the agony

Of battle-field or storm!

O Death! O birth to higher life!
O gate of the unknown,

That every child of man must pass,
Mysteriously alone!

We dread thee not for parting pains,

Or horrors of the tomb,

Thou undiscovered mystery,

Thou universal doom!

We dread thee not for shutting up
The fateful book of life;

For oft it tells a chequered tale

Of weariness and strife.

We dread thee for the cruelty

Of life-enduring pains,

Of sundered souls, that Love would bind

With adamantine chains.

But Love can leap the shadowy gulf,

If it be strong and true;

And bind together faithful hearts,
Though one is lost to view.

Yes! Love can leap the gulf between

Eternity and Time,

And bind together faithful hearts

In sympathy sublime.

There is a death more terrible

Than death of wife or child

A death to which the aching heart
Is never reconciled;

A death that knows no charnel-house,

No horrors of the tomb;

A death in life; a living death;
A dark and hopeless doom;

A death that sunders human souls,
And sunders them for ever;
A death whose ashes of regret
Can be rekindled never;

A death whose withered hopelessness,
Like leaves upon the ground,
The winds of life but sigh upon,
With sad and sorrowing sound;

A death that has no recompense,
In earth, or heaven above:

The death that kills the balm of death—
The death, the death, of Love.

STRICKEN FACES.

As travellers through a land unknown
Take note of things they chance to find

That, strange or beautiful, are fit
To be possessions of the mind,

And stores of thoughts and memories,
Within the chambers of the brain,

For bankrupt life to draw upon

And bring its pleasures back again,

So I, a traveller through a world
Of many-sided life and thought,
Watch faces on whose painfulness
The agonies of earth have wrought

Sad mirrored pictures of the storms,
And living records of the strife

Of passions, that have swept the strings,
Half broken, of the harp of life,

And when I see a face that looks
On scenes of festival and mirth
With listless eyes, as one who has
No part in revelries of earth,—

Like some sad soul that gazes from The land of hopelessness and tears, Across the gulf impassable,

On joys it knew in happier years,

My deepest tenderness is touched,

And pity, that is love Divine,

Fans high the purifying fires

That cleanse the soul, and shine

Upon our poor mortality,

And make it like to God, and purge

Its dross of selfishness away,

And with a mighty impulse urge