Sorrows and sings.

My God, my God, and life is here
So simple and still!
Far off, the murmuring town I hear
At the wind's will....

_What hast thou done, thou, weeping there?
O quick, the truth!
What hast thou done, thou, weeping there,
With thy lost youth?_

TO A FRIEND OF BOYHOOD LOST AT SEA

O warm blue sky and dazzling sea,
Where have you hid my friend from me?
The white-chalk coast, the leagues of surf
Laugh to the May-light, now as then,
And violets in the short sweet turf
Make fragmentary heavens again,
And sea-born wings of rustling snow
Pass and re-pass as long ago.

Old friend, do you remember yet
The days when secretly we met
In that old harbor years a-back,
Where I admired your billowing walk,
Or in that perilous fishing smack
What tarry oaths perfumed your talk,
The sails we set, the ropes we spliced,
The raw potato that we sliced,

For mackerel-bait--and how it shines
Far down, at end of the taut lines!--
And the great catch we made that day,

Loading our boat with rainbows, quick
And quivering, while you smoked your clay
And I took home your "Deadwood Dick"
In yellow and red, when day was done
And you took home my Stevenson?

Not leagues, as when you sailed the deep,
But only some frail bars of sleep
Sever us now! Methinks you still
Recall, as I, in dreams, the quay,
The little port below the hill:
And all the changes of the sea,
Like some great music, can but roll
Our lives still nearer to the goal.

OUR LADY OF THE TWILIGHT

Our Lady of the Twilight
From out the sunset-lands
Comes gently stealing o'er the world
And stretches out her hands,
Over the blotched and broken wall,
The blind and foetid lane,
She stretches out her hands and all
Is beautiful again.

No factory chimneys can defile
The beauty of her dress:
She stoops down with her heavenly smile
To heal and love and bless:
All tortured things, all evil powers,
All shapes of dark distress
Are turned to fragrance and to flowers
Beneath her kind caress.

Our Lady of the Twilight,
She melts our prison-bars!
She makes the sea