A VALLEY IN SPRING-TIME. 73 A VALLEY IN SPRING-TIME. A GREEN and silent spot, amid the hills; Which all, methinks, would love; but chiefly he, In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, L SPRING FLOWERS. How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are Thy returns! e'en as the flowers in Spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing. Who would have thought my shrivelled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite under ground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown : Where they, together, All the hard weather, Dead to the world, keep house unknown. O that I once past changing were, Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! Many a Spring I shoot up fair Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither. Nor doth my flower Want a Spring shower; My sins and I joining together. And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write : THE FIRST SWALLOW. It cannot be That I am he On whom Thy tempests fell at night! These are Thy wonders, Lord of love! Swelling through store, Forfeit their Paradise by their pride. THE FIRST SWALLOW. THE gorse is yellow on the heath, The banks with speedwell flowers are gay, The oaks are budding, and beneath, The hawthorn soon will bear the wreath, The welcome guest of settled Spring, Come, Summer visitant, attach To my reed roof your nest of clay, 75 Lo! such the child whose early feet THE DAY OF FLOWERS. 77 By cool Siloam's shady rill The lily must decay, The rose that blooms beneath the hill And soon, too soon, the wintry hour Of man's maturer age, Will shake the soul with sorrow's power, . O Thou, whose infant feet were found Whose years, with changeless virtue crowned, Dependent on Thy bounteous breath, In childhood, manhood, age, and death, THE DAY OF FLOWERS. O FATHER! Lord! The All-beneficent! I bless Thy name That Thou hast mantled the green earth with flowers, Linking our hearts to Nature. By the love Of their wild blossoms, our young footsteps first Into her deep recesses are beguiled— |