A Friend there is—your voices join,
Ye saints, to praise his name!—
Whose truth and kindness are divine,
Whose love's a constant flame.

When most we need his helping hand,
This friend is always near;
With heav'n and earth at his command,
He waits to answer prayer.

His love no end or measure knows,
No change can turn its course;
Immutably the same it flows
From one eternal source.

When frowns appear to veil his face,
And clouds surround his throne,
He hides the purpose of his grace,
To make it better known.

The moonlight is a silver sea
Where shadow-ships at anchor ride,
And on the wind there seems to be
A rhythmic murmur, far and wide,
As if the heaving Ocean still
Raised toward his white love in the sky
A following tide of dreams, that fill
The slumbering forest with their sigh.

All quiet lie the shadow-ships
Athwart the silver sea of night;
Its waveless flood around them slips,
A star their only riding light.
As if, where all alone she rides,
The Moon recalled her love, the Sea;
And all her dreams are silver tides

Every day I muse upon thee:
Life and joy thou art to me.
If a faithful heart could win thee,
Soon my own love thou wouldst be.
Ah, how sweet to dwell with thee!

Swift my years would glide away;
All around would laugh with pleasure;
Rich would be the priceless treasure.
Art could find no words to say,
How my bounding thoughts would play.

Let me then be ever nigh thee.
Youth shall be our spring of love;
Mild as any mother dove,
Age shall sit in quiet by thee.
Never may misfortune try thee.

I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.
For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog,
That I might love thee something.

A SUFFERING soul in sorrow's vale
Now pleads for sympathy:
“‘Could ye not watch with me one hour’
In my Gethsemane?

My neighbor of the Happy Heights,
Could you not, lovingly,
Divide your happiness with me,
In my Gethsemane?

To every soul must come, some day,
Its meed of agony;
But blest will be the bountiful
In their Gethsemane.”

Other people too have friends that they love;
But ours was a love such as few friends have known
You were all my sustenance; it mattered more
To see you daily than to get my morning food
And if there was a single day when we did not meet
I would sit listless, my mind in a tangle of gloom
To think we are now thousands of miles apart,
Lost like clouds, each drifting on his far way!
Those clouds on high, where many winds blow,
What is their chance of ever meeting again?
And if in open heaven the beings of the air
Are driven and thwarted, what of Man below?

“Get a lovely spray of cherry blossoms when you come to me.
Get one to decorate my bedroom when you come to me.”
“What will you do with blossoms? My sword is your bedroom decoration!”
“For my bedroom decoration, blossoms from that hill!”

If you can count the leaves of the trees,
Or the foaming waves of the untamed seas,
Then will I entrust to you alone
To reckon the amours I have known.
Take at Athens twenty mistresses,
And then you may add fifteen to these.
Put me a countless number down
At Corinth, that famed Achæan town,
Where the women are so dangerously fair
From falling in love one can't escape there.
My Lesbian I will now indite,
Next Ionian and Carian; and you may write
Many at Rhodes, all my heart's delight.
The sum when computed carefully

Say, my lovely star! O say,
Art thou gloomy—art thou gay?

Art thou gloomy—O be bright—
Pour on me thy streams of light!

Pour thy streams of light on me,
And awaken memory.

Wilt thou love God, as he thee! then digest,
My Soule, this wholsome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by Angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his Temple in thy brest.
The Father having begot a Sonne most blest,
And still begetting, (for he ne'er begonne)
Hath deign'd to chuse thee by adoption,
Coheire to'his glory,'and Sabbaths endlesse rest.
And as a robb'd man, which by search doth finde
His stolne stuffe sold, must lose or buy'it againe:
The Sonne of glory came downe, and was slaine,
Us whom he'had made, and Satan stolne, to unbinde.