Resignation. Let us be patient! These severe afflictions Not from the ground arise, But oftentimes celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise. We see but dimly through the mists and vapours ; What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers, May be Heaven's distant lamps. There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian, She is not dead,—the child of our affection,- Where she no longer needs our poor protection, In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, Day after day, we think what she is doing Year after year, her tender steps pursuing, Behold her grown more fair. Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken The bond which nature gives, Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken, 191 Not as a child shall we again behold her; In our embraces we again enfold her, But a fair maiden in her Father's mansion, And beautiful with all the soul's expansion And though at times impetuous with emotion The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean We will be patient, and assuage the feeling We may not wholly stay; By silence sanctifying, not concealing, The grief that must have way. The Wilderness shall Blossom as the Rose. DUET. J. E. CARPENTER.-Music by Stephen Glover. 'HE wilderness shall be made glad THE And blossom like the rose; The desert shall rejoice for them Who on His word repose; They who have own'd the mighty power And excellence of Him, Before whose face the stars are pale, The sun itself is dim! The Marriage Portion. And they the beauty shall behold And with loud joy and singing praise And the lame man shall leap as the hart, And all things have a brighter birth The Marriage Portion. Num. vi. 24-26. J. E. CARPENTER.—Music by M. T. Paradis. LORD and Father of creation! From Thy heavenly throne above, Deign to bless their plighted love; To the bride, beyond her beauty, On her heavenly gifts bestow. N 193 So their bridal gifts shall never Like Morning, when her Early Breeze. L" T. MOORE.-Air, Beethoven. IKE morning, when her early breeze That in those furrows, dark with night, Thy grace can send its breathings o'er Till David touch'd his sacred lyre, So sleeps the soul, till Thou, O Lord, I Magdalen's Hymn during the Plague. The Dying Christian. Phil. i. 23. J. E. CARPENTER.—Air, German. HAVE a desire to depart, obeying The heavenly call that bids me fly to rest ; What is the earth to me, with all its errors? Long have I struggled with its empty show; Magdalen's Hymn during the Plague. HE air of death breathes through our souls, TH The dead all round us lie; By day and night the death-bell tolls, And says, "Prepare to die.” The face that in the morning sun We thought so wondrous fair, Hath faded, ere his course was run, Beneath its golden hair. 195 |