And purge the silver ore adulterate.

h;

She sat and wept, and with her untressed hair
Still wiped the feet she was so blest to touch
And He wiped off the soiling of despair
From her sweet soul, because she loved so much.

I am a sinner, full of doubts and fears,

Make me a humble thing of love and tears.

IX.

REPENTANCE BEFORE FORGIVENESS.*

If I have sinned in act, I may repent;
If I have erred in thought, I may disclaim
My silent error, and yet feel no shame;
But if my soul, big with an ill intent,
Guilty in will, by fate be innocent,

Or being bad, yet murmurs at the curse
And incapacity of being worse,

Making my hungry passion still keep Lent
In keen expectance of a Carnival,

Where, in all worlds that round the Sun revolve
And shed their influence on this passive ball,
Abides a power that can my soul absolve?
Could any sin survive, and be forgiven,

One sinful wish would make a hell of heaven.

May one be pardoned, and retain the offence?"- Shakspeare.

SENSE, IF YOU CAN FIND IT.

LIKE one pale, flitting, lonely gleam
Of sunshine on a winter's day,
There came a thought upon my dream,
I know not whence, but fondly deem
It came from far away.

Those sweet, sweet snatches of delight
That visit our bedarkened clay,
Like passage birds, with hasty flight
It cannot be they perish quite,
Although they pass away.

They come and go, and come again;

They're ours, whatever time they stay: Think not, my heart, they come in vain, If one brief while they soothe thy pain Before they pass away.

But whither go they? No one knows

Their home, but yet they seem to say,

That far beyond this gulf of woes,

There is a region of repose

For them that pass away.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

1770-1834.

WHO PRAYETH BEST.

O WEDDING-GUEST! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea:

So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seeméd there to be.

O sweeter than the marriage-feast,

'Tis sweeter far to me,

To walk together to the kirk

With a goodly company!

To walk together to the kirk,

And all together pray;

While each to his great Father bends,

Old men, and babes, and loving friends,

And youths and maidens gay!

7*

(77)

Farewell! farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest,
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

MAN REDEEMABLE.

LINES ON VISITING A PRISON.

AND this place my forefathers made for man!
With other ministrations thou, O Nature!
Healest thy wandering and distempered child:

Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,—
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure

To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit healed and harmonized
By the benignant touch of love and beauty.

William Wordsworth.

1770-1850.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY, FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

OUR birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar :
Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy;

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;

The youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's priest,