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EUDOXIA.
FIRST PICTURE.
- O SWEETEST my sister, my sister that sits in the sun,
- Her lap full of jewels, and roses in showers on her hair;
- Soft smiling and counting her riches up slow, one by one,
- Cool‐browed, shaking dew from her garlands—those garlands so fair,
- Many gasp, climb, snatch, struggle, and die for—her every‐day wear!
- O beauteous my sister, turn downwards those mild eyes of thine,
- Lest they stab with their smiling, and blister or scorch where they shine.
- Young sister who never yet sat for an hour in the cold,
- Whose cheek scarcely feels half the roses that throng to caress,
- Whose light hands hold loosely these jewels and silver and gold,
- Remember thou those in the world who forever on press
- In perils and watchings, and hunger and nakedness,
- While thou sit’st content in the sunlight that round thee doth shine.
- Take heed! these have long borne their burthen—now lift thou up thine.
- Be meek—as befits one whose cup to the brim is love‐crowned,
- While others in dry dust drop empty—What, what canst thou know
- Of the wild human tide that goes sweeping eternally round
- The isle where thou sit’st pure and calm as a statue of snow,
- Around which good thoughts like kind angels continually go?
- Be pitiful. Whose eyes once turned from the angels to shine
- Upon publicans, sinners? O sister, ’t will not pollute thine.
- Who, even‐eyed, looks on His children, the black and the fair,
- The loved and the unloved, the tempted, untempted—marks all,
- And metes—not as man metes? If thou with weak tender hand dare
- To take up His balances—say where His justice should fall,
- Far better be Magdalen dead at the gate of thy hall—
- Dead, sinning, and loving, and contrite, and pardoned, to shine
- Midst he saints high in heaven, than thou, angel sister of mine!
