My son is a bright, brave boy, with a grace
Of beauty caught from his mother’s face,
And his mother and he in truth are dear,
Full tenderly, and fond, and near
My heart is bound to my wife and child;
But the summer of life is not its May,
And dreams and hopes that our youth beguiled,
Are but pallid forms of clay.

There’s the boy’s first love and passionate dream,
A face like a morning star, a gleam
Of hair the hue of a robin’s wing—­
Brown hair aglow with a golden sheen,
And eyes the sweetest that ever were seen.

Mary, we have been parted long,
You were proud, and we both were wrong,
But ’tis over and past, no living gleam
Can come again to the dear, dead dream. 
It is dead, so let it lie,
But nothing, nothing can ever be
Like that old dream to you or to me.

I think we shall know, shall know at last,
All that was strange in all the past,
Shall one day know, and shall haply see
That the sorrows and ills, that with tears and sighs,
We vainly endeavored to flee,
Were angels who, veiled in sorrow’s guise
Came to us only to bless. 
Maybe we shall kneel and kiss their feet,
With grateful tears, when we shall meet
Their unveiled faces, pure and sweet,
Their eyes’ deep tenderness. 
We shall know, perchance, had these angels come
Like mendicants unto a kingly gate
When we sat in joy’s royal state,
We had barred them from our home. 
But when in our doorway one appears
Clothed in the purple of sorrow’s power,
He will enter in, no prayers or tears
Avail us in that hour. 
So what we call our pains and losses
We may not always count aright,
The rough bars of our heavy crosses
May change to living light.

GLORIA THE TRUE.

Gayly a knight set forth against the foe,
For a fair face had shone on him in dreams;
A voice had stirred the silence of his sleep,
“Go win the battle, and I will be thine.”

So, for the love of those appealing eyes,
Led by low accents of fair Gloria’s voice,
He wound the bugle down his castle’s steep,
And gayly rode to battle in the morn.

And none were braver in the tented field,
Like lightning heralding the doomful bolt;
The enemy beheld his snowy plume,
And death-lights flashed along his glancing spear.

But in the lonesome watches of the night,
An angel came and warned him with clear voice,
Against high God his rash right arm was raised,
Was rashly raised against the true, the right.

He strove to drown the angel voice with song
And merry laughter with his princely peers;
But still the angel bade him with clear voice,
“Go join the ranks you rashly have opposed.”

“Oh, Angel!” cried he, “they are few and weak,
They may not stand before the press of knights;”
But still the angel bade him with clear voice,
“Go help the weak against the mighty wrong.”