The Project Gutenberg EBook of Verses, by Susan Coolidge

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Title: Verses

Author: Susan Coolidge

Posting Date: August 8, 2009 [EBook #4560]
Release Date: October, 2003
First Posted: February 11, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VERSES ***

Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

VERSES.

BY

SUSAN COOLIDGE.

TO J. H. AND E. W. H.

Nourished by peaceful suns and gracious dew,
Your sweet youth budded and your sweet lives grew,
And all the world seemed rose-beset for you.

The rose of beauty was your mutual dower,
The stainless rose of love, an early flower,
The stately blooms of ease and wealth and power.

And treading thus on pathways flower-bestrewn,
It well might be, that, cold and careless grown,
You both had lived for your own joys alone.

But, holding all these fair things as in trust.
Gently you walked, still scattering on the dust
Of harder roads, which others tread, and must,--

Your heritage of brightness, not a ray
Of noontide sought you out, but straight away
You caught and halved it with some darker day:

And as the sweet saint's loaves were turned, it is said,
To roses, so your roses turned to bread,
That hungering souls and weary might be fed.

Dear friends, my poor words do but paint you wrong,
Nor can I utter, in one trivial song,
The goodness I have honored for so long.

Only this leaf, a single petal flung,
One chord from a full harmony unsung,
May speak the life-long love that lacks a tongue.

CONTENTS.

To J. H. and E. W. H.
Prelude
Commissioned
The Cradle Tomb in Westminster Abbey
"Of such as I have"
A Portrait
When?
On the Shore
Among the Lilies
November
Embalmed
Ginevra Degli Amieri
Easter Lilies
Ebb-Tide
Flood-Tide
A Year
Tokens
Her Going
A Lonely Moment
Communion
A Farewell
Ebb and Flow
Angelus
The Morning Comes Before the Sun
Laborare est Orare
Eighteen
Outward Bound
From East to West
Una
Two Ways to Love
After-Glow
Hope and I
Left Behi