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legend of a veil.
What had been left? The thought is bitter bleak:
Dreary and gray as the Siberian wilds,
Had spread my life. But God would still have been:
I should have met him in the wilderness,
Thee, afterward, perhaps, in Heaven.
Dreary and gray as the Siberian wilds,
Had spread my life. But God would still have been:
I should have met him in the wilderness,
Thee, afterward, perhaps, in Heaven.
Mine own!
Whene'er I hear the convent vesper-bell,
Or echo of a midnight cloister-chant,
The manly chorals in sonorous praise
Responding to the unseen sisters' hymn,
I think there may be hearts like thine and mine,
Hidden behind the nun's veil and the cowl,
Forever separated, yet so near!
God listens through the screens they cannot lift;
The chords lost here ring full in heaven. And yet
'T is surely better to strike all the keys
Of this our manifold being to His praise,
Sending through low and high, through discords even,
One thrill of unison. All we have is His,
And we ourselves; and we will live so here,
That in that land where are no marriages,
We shall forever in one mansion dwell,
Still finding Heaven in some joint work for Him.
Whene'er I hear the convent vesper-bell,
Or echo of a midnight cloister-chant,
The manly chorals in sonorous praise
Responding to the unseen sisters' hymn,
I think there may be hearts like thine and mine,
Hidden behind the nun's veil and the cowl,
Forever separated, yet so near!
God listens through the screens they cannot lift;
The chords lost here ring full in heaven. And yet
'T is surely better to strike all the keys
Of this our manifold being to His praise,
Sending through low and high, through discords even,
One thrill of unison. All we have is His,
And we ourselves; and we will live so here,
That in that land where are no marriages,
We shall forever in one mansion dwell,
Still finding Heaven in some joint work for Him.
