And, vainly longing, gazes o’er
The waste of wave and sky;
So from the desert of my fate
I gaze across the past;
Forever on life’s dial-plate
The shade is backward cast!
I ’ve wandered wide from shore to shore,
I ’ve knelt at many a shrine;
And bowed me to the rocky floor
Where Bethlehem’s tapers shine;
And by the Holy Sepulchre
I ’ve pledged my knightly sword
To Christ, His blessed Church, and her,
The Mother of our Lord.
Oh, vain the vow, and vain the strife!
How vain do all things seem!
My soul is in the past, and life
To-day is but a dream!
In vain the penance strange and long,
And hard for flesh to bear;
The prayer, the fasting, and the thong,
And sackcloth shirt of hair.
The eyes of memory will not sleep,—
Its ears are open still;
And vigils with the past they keep
Against my feeble will.
And still the loves and joys of old
Do evermore uprise;
I see the flow of locks of gold,
The shine of loving eyes!
Ah me! upon another’s breast
Those golden locks recline;
I see upon another rest
The glance that once was mine.
“O faithless priest! O perjured knight!”
I hear the Master cry;
“Shut out the vision from thy sight,
Let Earth and Nature die.
“The Church of God is now thy spouse,
And thou the bridegroom art;
Then let the burden of thy vows
Crush down thy human heart!”
In vain! This heart its grief must know,
Till life itself hath ceased,
And falls beneath the self-same blow
The lover and the priest!
O pitying Mother! souls of light,
And saints and martyrs old!
Pray for a weak and sinful knight,
A suffering man uphold.
Then let the Paynim work his will,
And death unbind my chain,
Ere down yon blue Carpathian hill
The sun shall fall again.
CASSANDRA SOUTHWICK
In 1658 two young persons, son and daughter of Lawrence Southwick of Salem, who had himself been imprisoned and deprived of nearly all his property for having entertained Quakers at his house, were fined for non-attendance at church. They being unable to pay the fine, the General Court issued an order empowering “the Treasurer of the County to sell the said persons to any of the English nation of Virginia or Barbadoes, to answer said fines.” An attempt was made to carry this order into execution, but no shipmaster was found willing to convey them to the West Indies.
To the God of all sure mercies let my blessing rise to-day,
From the scoffer and the cruel He hath plucked the spoil away;
Yea, He who cooled the furnace around the faithful three,
And tamed the Chaldean lions, hath set His handmaid free!
Last night I saw the sunset melt through my prison bars,
Last night across my damp earth-floor fell the pale gleam of stars;
In the coldness and the darkness all through the long night-time,
My grated casement whitened with autumn’s early rime.
Alone, in that dark sorrow, hour after hour crept by;
Star after star looked palely in and sank adown the sky;
No sound amid night’s stillness, save that which seemed to be
The dull and heavy beating of the pulses of the sea;
