god

When twenty-one I loved to dream,
And was to loafing well inclined;
Somehow I couldn't get up steam
To welcome work of any kind.
While students burned the midnight lamp,
With dour ambition as their goad,
I longed to be a gayful tramp
And greet adventure on the road.

But now that sixty years have sped,
Behold! I toil from morn to night.
The thoughts that teem into my head
I pray: God give me time to write.
With eager and unflagging pen
No drudgery of desk I shirk,

For failure I was well equipped
And should have come to grief,
By atavism grimly gripped,
A fool beyond belief.
But lo! the Lord was good to me,
And with a heart to sing,
He gave me to a rare degree
The Gift of Wondering.

I could not play a stalwart part
My shoddy soul to save,
And should have gone with broken heart
A begger to the grave;
But praise to my anointed sight
As wandering I went,
I sang of living with delight

I stood before a candy shop
Which with a Christmas radiance shone;
I saw my parents pass and stop
To grin at me and then go on.
The sweets were heaped in gleamy rows;
On each I feasted - what a game!
Against the glass with flatted nose,
Gulping my spittle as it came;
So still I stood, and stared and dreamed,
Savouring sweetness with my eyes,
Devouring dainties till it seemed
My candy shop was paradise.

I had, I think, but five years old,
And though three-score and ten have passed,

(Proverbs, viii. 22-31)

"Ere God had built the mountains,
Or raised the fruitful hills;
Before he fill'd the fountains
That feed the running rills;
In me from everlasting,
The wonderful I am,
Found pleasures never wasting,
And Wisdom is my name.

"When, like a tent to dwell in,
He spread the skies abroad,
And swathed about the swelling
Of Ocean's mighty flood;
He wrought by weight and measure,
And I was with Him then:
Myself the Father's pleasure,

We women teach our little sons how wrong
And how ignoble blows are; school and church
Support our precepts and inoculate
The growing minds with thoughts of love and peace.
‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite, ’ we say;
But human beings with immortal souls
Must rise above the methods of the brute
And walk with reason and with self-control.

And then – dear God! you men, you wise, strong men,
Our self-announced superiors in brain,
Our peers in judgement, you go forth to war!
You leap at one another, mutilate

How like an angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among his works I did appear
O how their glory me did crown!
The world resembled his eternity,
In which my soul did walk;
And ev'ry thing that I did see
Did with me talk.

The skies in their magnificence,
The lively, lovely air;
Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!
The stars did entertain my sense,
And all the works of God, so bright and pure,
So rich and great did seem,
As if they ever must endure

Fellow men! why should the lords try to despise
And prohibit women from having the benefit of the parliamentary Franchise?
When they pay the same taxes as you and me,
I consider they ought to have the same liberty.

And I consider if they are not allowed the same liberty,
From taxation every one of them should be set free;
And if they are not, it is really very unfair,
And an act of injustice I most solemnly declare.

Women, farmers, have no protection as the law now stands;

The dog has shrunk between the brake and clutch. His shaking shakes a two-ton truck. From a God

When Wisdom tells me that the world’s a speck
Lost on the shoreless blue of God’s To-Day...
I smile, and think, ‘For every man his way:
The world’s my ship, and I’m alone on deck!’
And when he tells me that the world’s a spark
Lit in the whistling gloom of God’s To-Night...
I look within me to the edge of dark,
And dream, ‘The world’s my field, and I’m the lark,
Alone with upward song, alone with light!’

Within the circuit of this plodding life
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring stew them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievences.
I have remembered when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
On the every twig and rail and jutting spout,
The icy spears were adding to their length