The true improvement of life.

Ps. 90:12.

Ane is this life prolonged to me?
Are days and seasons giv'n?
O let me, then, prepare to be
A fitter heir of heav'n.

In vain these moments shall not pass,
These golden hours be gone:
Lord, I accept thine offered grace,
I bow before thy throne.

Now cleanse my soul from every sin
By my Redeemer's blood;
Now let my flesh and soul begin
The honors of my God.

Let me no more my soul beguile
With sin's deceitful toys;
Let cheerful hope, increasing still,

The Christian's hidden life.

Col. 3:3.

O happy soul that lives on high
While men lie grov'lling here
His hopes are fixed above the sky,
And faith forbids his fear.

His conscience knows no secret stings,
While peace and joy combine
To form a life whose holy springs
Are hidden and divine.

He waits in secret on his God,
His God in secret sees;
Let earth be all in arms abroad,
He dwells in heav'nly peace.

His pleasures rise from things unseen,
Beyond this world and time;

Christ's presence makes death easy.

Why should we start, and fear to die
What timorous worms we mortals are!
Death is the gate of endless joy,
And yet we dread to enter there.

The pains, the groans, and dying strife,
Fright our approaching souls away;
Still we shrink back again to life,
Fond of our prison and our clay.

O! if my Lord would come and meet,
My soul should stretch her wings in haste,
Fly fearless through death's iron gate,
Nor feel the terrors as she passed.

Jesus can make a dying bed

Christ the eternal life.

Rom. 9:5.

Jesus, our Savior and our God,
Arrayed in majesty and blood,
Thou art our life; our souls in thee
Possess a full felicity.

All our immortal hopes are laid
In thee, our surety and our head;
Thy cross, thy cradle, and thy throne,
Are big with glories yet unknown.

Let atheists scoff, and Jews blaspheme
Th' eternal life and Jesus' name;
A word of thy almighty breath
Dooms the rebellious world to death.

But let my soul for ever lie
Beneath the blessings of thine eye;

Spiritual apparel.

Isa. 61:10.

Awake, my heart; arise, my tongue,
Prepare a tuneful voice;
In God, the life of all my joys,
Aloud will I rejoice.

'Tis he adorned my naked soul,
And made salvation mine;
Upon a poor polluted worm
He makes his graces shine.

And lest the shadow of a spot
Should on my soul be found,
He took the robe the Savior wrought,
And cast it all around.

How far the heav'nly robe exceeds
What earthly princes wear
These ornaments, how bright they shine!

HUSH'D be the camps to-day;
And, soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons;
And each with musing soul retire, to celebrate,
Our dear commander's death.

No more for him life's stormy conflicts;
Nor victory, nor defeat--no more time's dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.


But sing, poet, in our name;
Sing of the love we bore him--because you, dweller in camps, know it
truly.

As they invault the coffin there; 10

Hush'd be the camps today,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander's death.

No more for him life's stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat--no more time's dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.

But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him--because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.

As they invault the coffin there,
Sing--as they close the doors of earth upon him--one verse,

I've been a hopeless sinner, but I understand a
saint,
Their bend of weary knees and their con-
tortions long and faint,
And the endless pricks of conscience, like a hundred
thousand pins,
A real perpetual penance for imaginary sins.

I love to wander widely, but I understand a cell,
Where you tell and tell your beads because you've
nothing else to tell,
Where the crimson joy of flesh, with all its wild
fantastic tricks,
Is forgotten in the blinding glory of the crucifix.

I cannot speak for others, but my inmost soul is

My virtues in Carara stone
Cut carefully you all my scan;
Beneath I lie, a fetid bone,
The marble worth more than the man.
II
If on my pure tomb they should grave
My vices,--how the folks would grin!
And say with sympathetic wave:
"Like us he was a man of sin."
III
And somehow he consoled thereby,
Knowing they may, though Hades bent,
When finally they come to die,
Enjoy a snow-white monument.
IV
And maybe it is just as well
When we from life and lust are riven,
That though our souls should sink to hell

You flaunt your beauty in the rose, your glory in the dawn,
Your sweetness in the nightingale, your white- ness in the swan.

You haunt my waking like a dream, my slumber like a moon,
Pervade me like a musky scent, possess me like a tune.

Yet, when I crave of you, my sweet, one tender moment's grace,
You cry, "I sit behind the veil, I cannot show my face."

Shall any foolish veil divide my longing from my bliss?
Shall any fragile curtain hide your beauty from my kiss?

What war is this of Thee and Me? Give o'er the wanton strife,