O WEARY winds! O winds that wail!
O'er desert fields and ice-locked rills!
O heavens that brood so cold and pale
Above the frozen Norland hills!
Nature is like some sorrowing soul,
Robed in a garb of dreariest woe;--
She cannot see her vernal goal
Through ghostly veils of mist and snow:--
Her pulse beats low; through all her veins,
Scarce can the sluggish life-blood start;
What feeble, faltering heat sustains
The half-numbed forces of her heart!
Above, despondent eyes she lifts,
To view the sun-ray's dubious birth;
Beneath she marks the storm-piled drifts
About a waste bewildering earth!
Ah, stricken Mother! hast thou lost
All memory of the germs that rest
Untouched by tempest, rain, or frost,
Shrined in thine own immortal breast?
Bend, bend thine ear; yea, bend and hear,--
Despite the winds' and woodlands' strife,--
Deep in Earth's bosom, faint and clear,
The far-off murmurous hints of life:--
The sound of waves in whispering flow;
Of seeds that stir in dreams of light,
Whose sweetness mocks the shrouded snow,
Whose radiance smiles at death and night;
So, Christian spirit! wrapt in grief,--
Beneath thy misery's frozen sod,
Love works, to burst in flower and leaf,
On some fair spring-dawn fresh from God!
