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IN THE JUNE TWILIGHT.
Suggested by Noel Paton’s Picture of “The Silver Cord Loosed.”
- IN the June twilight, in the soft gray twilight,
- The yellow sun‐glow trembling through the rainy eve,
- As my love lay quiet, came the solemn fiat,
- “All these things forever—forever—thou must leave.”
- My love she sank down quivering, like a pine in tempest shivering—
- “I have had so little happiness as yet beneath the sun:
- I have called the shadow sunshine, and the merest frosty moonshine
- I have, weeping, blessed the Lord for, as if daylight had begun;
- “Till He sent a sudden angel, with a glorious sweet evangel,
- Who turned all my tears to pearl‐gems, and crowned me—so little worth;
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- Me!—and through the rainy even changed my poor earth into heaven,
- Or, by wondrous revelation, brought the heavens down to earth.
- “O the strangeness of the feeling!—O the infinite revealing—
- To think how God must love me to have made me so content!
- Though I would have served Him humbly, and patiently, and dumbly,
- Without any angel standing in the pathway that I went.”
- In the June twilight—in the lessening twilight—
- My love cried from my bosom an exceeding bitter cry:
- “Lord, wait a little longer, until my soul is stronger,—
- O, wait till Thou hast taught me to be content to die.”
- Then the tender face, all woman, took a glory superhuman,
- And she seemed to watch for something, or see some I could not see:
- From my arms she rose full statured, all transfigured, queenly featured—
- “As Thy will is done in heaven, so on earth still let it be.”
- I go lonely, I go lonely, and I feel that earth is only
- The vestibule of palaces whose courts we never win:
- Yet I see my palace shining, where my love sits, amaranths twining,
- And I know the gates stand open, and I shall enter in.
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