GEORGE LOVEDAY.
[OMIT JET. 52, DECEMBER, 1887.] THE sapless leaves fell in the drear December In mourning on the dull, inverted clod; And the few faithful friends who must remember.
With head uncovered the sad surface trod.
Ay, surface ! light as the loose earth above him Are the weak bonds that held the spirit in; So for all those who dead or living love him, From out the grave springs a new sense of kin.
We knew him as he was,—so true and steady, So tender, where the best might well be hard; At a friend's call so ever strong and ready, That none might overcount our dear regard.
For him at least, we said, the sun of summer Should lighten up the funeral's dark array ; • To him should Death come as a radiant comer, When the bright world makes early holiday.
o spake our wisdom; but a wiser said it
In words low whispered through the winter's chill,— " Awake the ears that hear, and yet can credit The living message, quick for mortals still.
"When the dull earth lies brown and shrivelled round you, And Hope herself seems for the time half-dead, And the warm slimmer that caressed and crowned you Such short time syne, has vanished overhead,—
" When the cold stars look palely on the clearing, And the white moon but shivers all alone, And the brief day, in long night disappearing, Paints her grey canvas in a monotone,— " When old and new year part in sharp abruption, So yet things mortal and corrupt shall be, Till this corruptible wear incorrnption, This mortal put on immortality.
"No fitter hour for the disprisoned spirit To burst its bondage and its freedom gain, And from the Testament of old inherit The great immunity from loss and pain."
Something we felt of this ; and through the sorrow Something of comfort in the whisper found, And of the past a future seemed to borrow For him we laid, untimely, in the ground.
Dead—half-a-century old ! A mere derision To little bodies made of little clay, But what to Him, in whose majestic vision A thousand years are but as yesterday ?
Learn from our lost who can, one for another, The generous moral of the will to bless, And gather all that may, brother to brother, The lesson of his watchful kindliness.
Little we know; but what we know is certain; The revolution of December's wheel Behind the black but ever-rising curtain Doth but the promise of a May reveal.
So mystic Death came in her disc of glory, The message of the snow-drift sent to bring ; To us—the winter-memory of a story, To him—the priceless herald of the spring.
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