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TITLE: VERSES
AUTHOR: SUSAN COOLIDGE
EBOOK: E05086 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

VERSES.

BY

SUSAN COOLIDGE.

TO J. H.  AND E. W. H.

 Nourished by peaceful suns and gracious dew,
 Your sweet youth budded and your sweet lives grew,
 And all the world seemed rose-beset for you.

 The rose of beauty was your mutual dower,
 The stainless rose of love, an early flower,
 The stately blooms of ease and wealth and power.

 And treading thus on pathways flower-bestrewn,
 It well might be, that, cold and careless grown,
 You both had lived for your own joys alone.

 But, holding all these fair things as in trust.
 Gently you walked, still scattering on the dust
 Of harder roads, which others tread, and must,--

 Your heritage of brightness, not a ray
 Of noontide sought you out, but straight away
 You caught and halved it with some darker day:

 And as the sweet saint's loaves were turned, it is said,
 To roses, so your roses turned to bread,
 That hungering souls and weary might be fed.

 Dear friends, my poor words do but paint you wrong,
 Nor can I utter, in one trivial song,
 The goodness I have honored for so long.

 Only this leaf, a single petal flung,
 One chord from a full harmony unsung,
 May speak the life-long love that lacks a tongue.

CONTENTS.

To J. H. and E. W. H.
Prelude
Commissioned
The Cradle Tomb in Westminster Abbey
"Of such as I have"
A Portrait
When?
On the Shore
Among the Lilies
November
Embalmed
Ginevra Degli Amieri
Easter Lilies
Ebb-Tide
Flood-Tide
A Year
Tokens
Her Going
A Lonely Moment
Communion
A Farewell
Ebb and Flow
Angelus
The Morning Comes Before the Sun
Laborare est Orare
Eighteen
Outward Bound
From East to West
Una
Two Ways to Love
After-Glow
Hope and I
Left Behind
Savoir c'est Pardonner
Morning
A Blind Singer
Mary
When Love went
Overshadowed
Time to Go
Gulf-Stream
My White Chrysanthemum
Till the Day Dawn
My Birthday
By the Cradle
A Thunder Storm
Through the Door
Readjustment
At the Gate
A Home
The Legend of Kintu
Easter
Bind-Weed
April
May
Secrets
How the Leaves Came Down
Barcaroles
My Rights
Solstice
In the Mist
Within
Menace
"He That Believeth Shall Not Make Haste"
My Little Ghost
Christmas
Benedicam Domino

PRELUDE.

 Poems are heavenly things,
 And only souls with wings
 May reach them where they grow,
 May pluck and bear below,
 Feeding the nations thus
 With food all glorious.

 Verses are not of these;
 They bloom on earthly trees,
 Poised on a low-hung stem,
 And those may gather them
 Who cannot fly to where
 The heavenly gardens are.

 So I by devious ways
 Have pulled some easy sprays
 From the down-dropping bough
 Which all may reach, and now
 I knot them, bud and leaf,
 Into a rhymed sheaf.

 Not mine the pinion strong
 To win the nobler song;
 I only cull and bring
 A hedge-row offering
 Of berry, flower, and brake,
 If haply some may take.

VERSES.

COMMISSIONED.

"Do their errands; enter into the sacrifice with them; be a link
yourself in the divine chain, and feel the joy and life of it."
--ADELINE D. T. WHITNEY

 What can I do for thee, Beloved,
   Whose feet so little while ago
   Trod the same way-side dust with mine,
 And now up paths I do not know
   Speed, without sound or sign?

 What can I do? The perfect life
   All fresh and fair and beautiful
   Has opened its wide arms to thee;
 Thy cup is over-brimmed and full;
   Nothing remains for me.

 I used to do so many things,--
   Love thee and chide thee and caress;
   Brush little straws from off thy way,
 Tempering with my poor tenderness
   The heat of thy short day.

 Not much, but very sweet to give;
   And it is grief of griefs to bear
   That all these ministries are o'er,
 And thou, so happy, Love, elsewhere,
   Never can need me more:--

 And I can do for thee but this
   (Working on blindly, knowing not
   If I may give thee pleasure so):
 Out of my own dull, burdened lot
   I can arise, and go

 To sadder lives and darker homes,
   A messenger, dear heart, from thee
   Who wast on earth a comforter,
 And say to those who welcome me,
   I am sent forth by her.

 Feeling the while how good it is
   To do thy errands thus, and think
   It may be, in the blue, far space,
 Thou watchest from the heaven's brink,--
   A smile upon my face.

 And when the day's work ends with day,
   And star-eyed evening, stealing in,
   Waves a cool hand to flying noon,
 And restless, surging thoughts begin,
   Like sad bells out of tune,

 I'll pray: "Dear Lord, to whose great love

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