For, on a morn of sunshine, while the wind
Yet blew, and heaved yet the billowy sea
With memories of the night of deep unrest,
They found her in a basin of the rocks,
Which, buried in a firmament of sea
When ocean winds heap up the tidal waves,
Yet, in the respiration of the surge,
Lifts clear its edge of rock, full to the brim
With deep, clear, resting water, plentiful. 
There, in the blessedness of sleep, which God
Gives his beloved, she lay drowned and still. 
O life of love, conquered at last by fate! 
O life raised from the dead by Saviour Death! 
O love unconquered and invincible! 
The sea had cooled the burning of that brain;
Had laid to rest those limbs so fever-tense,
That scarce relaxed in sleep; and now she lies
Sleeping the sleep that follows after pain. 
’Twas one night more of agony and fear,
Of shrinking from the onset of the sea;
One cry of desolation, when her fear
Became a fact, and then,—­God knows the rest. 
O cure of all our miseries—­God knows!

O thou whose feet tread ever the wet sands
And howling rocks along the wearing shore,
Roaming the confines of the endless sea! 
Strain not thine eyes across, bedimmed with tears;
No sail comes back across that tender line. 
Turn thee unto thy work, let God alone;
He will do his part.  Then across the waves
Will float faint whispers from the better land,
Veiled in the dust of waters we call storms,
To thine averted ears.  Do thou thy work,
And thou shalt follow; follow, and find thine own.

O thou who liv’st in fear of the To come!
Around whose house the storm of terror breaks
All night; to whose love-sharpened ear, all day,
The Invisible is calling at thy door,
To render up that which thou can’st not keep,
Be it a life or love!  Open thy door,
And carry forth thy dead unto the marge
Of the great sea; bear it into the flood,
Braving the cold that creepeth to thy heart,
And lay thy coffin as an ark of hope
Upon the billows of the infinite sea. 
Give God thy dead to keep:  so float it back,
With sighs and prayers to waft it through the dark,
Back to the spring of life.  Say—­“It is dead,
But thou, the life of life, art yet alive,
And thou can’st give the dead its dear old life,
With new abundance perfecting the old. 
God, see my sadness; feel it in thyself.”

Ah God! the earth is full of cries and moans,
And dull despair, that neither moans nor cries;
Thousands of hearts are waiting the last day,
For what they know not, but with hope of change,
Of resurrection, or of dreamless death. 
Raise thou the buried dead of springs gone by
In maidens’ bosoms; raise the autumn fruits
Of old men feebly mournful o’er the life
Which scarce hath memory but the mournfulness. 
There is no Past with thee:  bring back once more
The summer eves of lovers, over which
The wintry wind that raveth through the world
Heaps wretched leaves, half tombed in ghastly snow;
Bring back the mother-heaven of orphans lone,
The brother’s and the sister’s faithfulness;
Bring forth the kingdom of the Son of Man.