IN the June twilight, in the soft gray twilight,
The yellow sun-glow trembling through the rainy eve,
As my love lay quiet, came the solemn fiat,
"All these things forever--forever--thou must leave."
My love she sank down quivering, like a pine in tempest shivering--
"I have had so little happiness as yet beneath the sun:
I have called the shadow sunshine, and the merest frosty moonshine
I have, weeping, blessed the Lord for, as if daylight had begun;
"Till He sent a sudden angel, with a glorious sweet evangel,
Who turned all my tears to pearl-gems, and crowned me--so little worth;
Me!--and through the rainy even changed my poor earth into heaven,
Or, by wondrous revelation, brought the heavens down to earth.
"O the strangeness of the feeling!--O the infinite revealing--
To think how God must love me to have made me so content!
Though I would have served Him humbly, and patiently, and dumbly,
Without any angel standing in the pathway that I went."
In the June twilight--in the lessening twilight--
My love cried from my bosom an exceeding bitter cry:
"Lord, wait a little longer, until my soul is stronger,--
O, wait till Thou hast taught me to be content to die."
Then the tender face, all woman, took a glory superhuman,
And she seemed to watch for something, or see some I could not see:
From my arms she rose full statured, all transfigured, queenly featured--
"As Thy will is done in heaven, so on earth still let it be."
* * * * *
I go lonely, I go lonely, and I feel that earth is only
The vestibule of palaces whose courts we never win:
Yet I see my palace shining, where my love sits, amaranths twining,
And I know the gates stand open, and I shall enter in.
