Chimes

Sweet chimes! that in the loneliness of night Salute the passing hour, and in the dark And silent chambers of the household mark The movements of the myriad orbs of light! Through my closed eyelids, by the inner sight, I see the constellations in the arc Of their great circles moving on, and hark! I almost hear them singing in their flight. Better than sleep it is to lie awake O'er-canopied by the vast starry dome Of the immeasurable sky; to feel The slumbering world sink under us, and make Hardly an eddy,--a mere rush of foam On the great sea beneath a sinking keel.

FOUR BY THE CLOCK.

"NAHANT, September 8, 1880, Four o'clock in the morning."

Four by the clock! and yet not day; But the great world rolls and wheels away, With its cities on land, and its ships at sea, Into the dawn that is to be!

Only the lamp in the anchored bark Sends its glimmer across the dark, And the heavy breathing of the sea Is the only sound that comes to me.

AUF WIEDERSEHEN.

IN MEMORY OF J.T.F.

Until we meet again! That is the meaning Of the familiar words, that men repeat At parting in the street. Ah yes, till then! but when death intervening Rends us asunder, with what ceaseless pain We wait for the Again!

The friends who leave us do not feel the sorrow Of parting, as we feel it, who must stay Lamenting day by day, And knowing, when we wake upon the morrow, We shall not find in its accustomed place The one beloved face.

It were a double grief, if the departed, Being released from earth, should still retain A sense of earthly pain; It were a double grief, if the true-hearted, Who loved us here, should on the farther shore Remember us no more.

Believing, in the midst of our afflictions, That death is a beginning, not an end, We cry to them, and send Farewells, that better might be called predictions, Being fore-shadowings of the future, thrown Into the vast Unknown.

Faith overleaps the confines of our reason, And if by faith, as in old times was said, Women received their dead Raised up to life, then only for a season Our partings are, nor shall we wait in vain Until we meet again!