O beautiful, awful summer day,
What hast thou given, what taken away? 
Life and death, and love and hate,
Homes made happy or desolate,
     Hearts made sad or gay!

On the road of life one mile-stone more! 
In the book of life one leaf turned o’er! 
Like a red seal is the setting sun
On the good and the evil men have done,—­
     Naught can to-day restore!

CHIMES

Sweet chimes! that in the loneliness of night
  Salute the passing hour, and in the dark
  And silent chambers of the household mark
  The movements of the myriad orbs of light! 
Through my closed eyelids, by the inner sight,
  I see the constellations in the arc
  Of their great circles moving on, and hark! 
  I almost hear them singing in their flight. 
Better than sleep it is to lie awake
  O’er-canopied by the vast starry dome
  Of the immeasurable sky; to feel
The slumbering world sink under us, and make
  Hardly an eddy,—­a mere rush of foam
  On the great sea beneath a sinking keel.

FOUR BY THE CLOCK.

“NAHANT, September 8, 1880,
Four o’clock in the morning.”

Four by the clock! and yet not day;
But the great world rolls and wheels away,
With its cities on land, and its ships at sea,
Into the dawn that is to be!

Only the lamp in the anchored bark
Sends its glimmer across the dark,
And the heavy breathing of the sea
Is the only sound that comes to me.

AUF WIEDERSEHEN.

IN MEMORY OF J.T.F.

Until we meet again!  That is the meaning
Of the familiar words, that men repeat
    At parting in the street. 
Ah yes, till then! but when death intervening
Rends us asunder, with what ceaseless pain
    We wait for the Again!

The friends who leave us do not feel the sorrow
Of parting, as we feel it, who must stay
    Lamenting day by day,
And knowing, when we wake upon the morrow,
We shall not find in its accustomed place
    The one beloved face.

It were a double grief, if the departed,
Being released from earth, should still retain
    A sense of earthly pain;
It were a double grief, if the true-hearted,
Who loved us here, should on the farther shore
    Remember us no more.

Believing, in the midst of our afflictions,
That death is a beginning, not an end,
    We cry to them, and send
Farewells, that better might be called predictions,
Being fore-shadowings of the future, thrown
    Into the vast Unknown.

Faith overleaps the confines of our reason,
And if by faith, as in old times was said,
    Women received their dead
Raised up to life, then only for a season
Our partings are, nor shall we wait in vain
    Until we meet again!