e eclipse from human eyes.
Surely as snow is friendly to the spring,
A madness may be friendly to the soul,
And shield it from a more enduring loss,
From the ice-spears of a heart-reaching frost.
So, after years, the winter of her life,
Came the sure spring to her men had forgot,
Closing the rent links of the social chain,
And leaving her outside their charmed ring.
Into the chill wind and the howling night,
God sent out for her, and she entered in
Where there was no more sea. What messengers
Ran from the door of love-contented heaven,
To lead her towards the real ideal home?
The sea, her terror, and the wintry wind.
For, on a morn of sunshine, while the wind
Yet blew, and heaved yet the billowy sea
With memories of the night of deep unrest,
They found her in a basin of the rocks,
Which, buried in a firmament of sea
When ocean winds heap up the tidal waves,
Yet, in the respiration of the surge,
Lifts clear its edge of rock, full to the brim
With deep, clear, resting water, plentiful.
There, in the blessedness of sleep, which God
Gives his beloved, she lay drowned and still.
O life of love, conquered at last by fate!
O life raised from the dead by Saviour Death!
O love unconquered and invincible!
The sea had cooled the burning of that brain;
Had laid to rest those limbs so fever-tense,
That scarce relaxed in sleep; and now she lies
Sleeping the sleep that follows after pain.
'Twas one night more of agony and fear,
Of shrinking from the onset of the sea;
One cry of desolation, when her fear
Became a fact, and then,--God knows the rest.
O cure of all our miseries--_God knows!_

O thou whose feet tread ever the wet sands
And howling rocks along the wearing shore,
Roaming the confines of the endless sea!
Strain not thine eyes across, bedimmed with tears;
No sail comes back across that tender line.
Turn thee unto thy work, let God alone;
He will do his part. Then across the waves
Will float faint whispers from the better land,
Veiled in the dust of waters we call storms,
To thine averted ears. Do thou thy work,
And thou shalt follow; follow, and find thine own.

O thou who liv'st in fear of the _To come!_
Around whose house the storm of terror breaks
All night; to whose love-sharpened ear, all day,
The Invisible is calling at thy door,
To render up that which thou can'st not keep,
Be it a life or love! Open thy door,
And carry forth thy dead unto the marge
Of the great sea; bear it into the flood,
Bravin