steals down
The west, and mystery
Moves deeper in their hearts and settles darker.
'Tis faded--the day's crown;
But strange and shadowy
They see the Unseen as night falls stark and starker.

Like priests whose altar fires
Are spent, immovable
They stand, in awful ecstasy uplifted.
Zephyrs awake tree-lyres,
The starry deeps are full,
Earth with a mystic majesty is gifted.

Ah, sunset-lovers, though
Time were but pulsing pain,
And death no more than its eternal ceasing,
Would you not choose the throe,
Hold the oblivion vain,
To have beheld so many a day's releasing?

THE EMPTY CROSS

The eve of Golgotha had come,
And Christ lay shrouded in the garden Tomb:
Among the olives, Oh, how dumb,
How sad the sun incarnadined the gloom!

The hill grew dim--the pleading cross
Reached empty arms toward the closing gate.
Jerusalem, oh, count thy loss!
Oh, hear ye! hear ye! ere it be too late!

Reached bleeding arms--but how in vain!
The murmurous multitude within the wall
Already had forgot His pain--
To-morrow would forget the cross--and all!

They knew not Rome, before its sign,
Bending her brow bound with the nations' threne,
Would sweep all lands from Nile to Rhine
In servitude unto the Nazarene.

Nor knew that millions would forsake
Ancestral shrines great with the glow of time,
And lifting up its token shake
Aeons with thrill of love or battle's crime.

With empty arms aloft it stood:
Ah, Scribe and Pharisee, ye builded well!
The cross emblotted with His blood
Mounts, highest Hope of men, against earth's hell!

UNBURTHENED

Not grief nor the sunny wine
Of gladness steeps my spirit as I gaze
Over these meads that lie engarmented
In stubble robes of winter-weary brown.
For, as those solitary trees afar
Have reached unbudding boughs to the dim day
And melted on the infinite calm of space,
So have I reached, and am no more distraught
With the quivering pangs of memory's yesterday.
But the boon of blue skies deeper than despair,
Of rest that rises as a tide of sleep,
Of care borne on the plumes of swan-swift clouds
Away to the sullen shades of the low west,
Have lulled my soul with soft infinitude--
And lent it faith's illimitable Peace.

SONG

Her v