POETRY:
DARKNESS AND LIGHT. OVER the kingdom of the ancient isles, Isles of the Shamrock, Thistle, and the Rose, On alien regions, on the hoary world, A shadow deep of pestilence and death ; Sharp anguish in innumerable homes, Sore memories to chill the daylight's warmth, And wreck the soothing fiction of a dream With sorrow's waking shudder and bleak truth ; A moan of misery multitudinous From famished myriads fading in despair, Through wastes of sullen forest, snowy steppe, The grisly realm of the doomed lonely Tsar : And o'er the unseen kingdom of the soul The shadow of a disenchanted time, A cold and hard, a sombre, csynic time, With wistful weakness in the faith should save, A palsied shiver in the hope should light Our climbing pathway to the peaks of life : And yet above the shadow shines the sun, The thrushes thrill the echoing air of dawn, And the soft amber of the breaking day Melts through our eastern elms, and fairy eve Kindles her far and immemorial fires Along those limpid and unruffled heights Where floats the lovely wonder of the moon : And still amidst the voices of the birds, Behind the beauty of the world, beyond The lofty and the gentle lights of heaven, Within the aching mystery of life, The exaltation, and the troubled hope, The fitful and the flickering joy of man, Wait comfort, freedom, clearness, calm, and power, A vision of fair angels and their peace, And the vast mercy of Almighty God.
JOSEPH TRUMAN.
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