Lord, by every minstrel tongue
Be Thy praise so duly sung,
That Thine angels’ harps may ne’er
Fail to find fit echoing here: 
We the while, of meaner birth,
   Who in that divinest spell
Dare not hope to join on earth,
   Give us grace to listen well.

But should thankless silence seal
Lips that might half Heaven reveal,
Should bards in idol-hymns profane
The sacred soul-enthralling strain,
(As in this bad world below
   Noblest things find vilest using,)
Then, Thy power and mercy show,
   In vile things noble breath infusing;

Then waken into sound divine
The very pavement of Thy shrine,
Till we, like Heaven’s star-sprinkled floor,
Faintly give back what we adore: 
Childlike though the voices be,
   And untunable the parts,
Thou wilt own the minstrelsy
   If it flow from childlike hearts.

MONDAY BEFORE EASTER

Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not.  Isaiah lxiii. 16.

“Father to me thou art and mother dear,
   And brother too, kind husband of my heart —
So speaks Andromache in boding fear,
   Ere from her last embrace her hero part —
So evermore, by Faith’s undying glow,
We own the Crucified in weal or woe.

Strange to our ears the church-bells of our home,
   This fragrance of our old paternal fields
May be forgotten; and the time may come
   When the babe’s kiss no sense of pleasure yields
E’en to the doting mother:  but Thine own
Thou never canst forget, nor leave alone.

There are who sigh that no fond heart is theirs,
   None loves them best—­O vain and selfish sigh! 
Out of the bosom of His love He spares —
   The Father spares the Son, for thee to die: 
For thee He died—­for thee He lives again: 
O’er thee He watches in His boundless reign.

Thou art as much His care, as if beside
   Nor man nor angel lived in Heaven or earth: 
Thus sunbeams pour alike their glorious tide
   To light up worlds, or wake an insect’s mirth: 
They shine and shine with unexhausted store —
Thou art thy Saviour’s darling—­seek no more.

On thee and thine, thy warfare and thine end,
   E’en in His hour of agony He thought,
When, ere the final pang His soul should rend,
   The ransomed spirits one by one were brought
To His mind’s eye—­two silent nights and days
In calmness for His far-seen hour He stays.

Ye vaulted cells, where martyred seers of old
   Far in the rocky walls of Sion sleep,
Green terraces and arched fountains cold,
   Where lies the cypress shade so still and deep,
Dear sacred haunts of glory and of woe,
Help us, one hour, to trace His musings high and low: 

One heart-ennobling hour!  It may not be: 
   The unearthly thoughts have passed from earth away,
And fast as evening sunbeams from the sea
   Thy footsteps all in Sion’s deep decay
Were blotted from the holy ground:  yet dear
Is every stone of hers; for Thou want surely here.