Thy creatures suffer, O Most High!
⁠And yet thy sons rejoice;
Thy birds sing on to dying men
⁠With clear, exulting voice;
Thy sunbeams dance among the flowers
⁠That veil our dead from sight,
And sorrow lays a harmless hand
⁠On ever-fresh delight.

O sacred Unity of Love!
⁠This life and death behind,
Attracting heart aloof from heart
⁠And mind at war with mind.
To the worn spirit grieved for thee
⁠At every passing jar,
How touching in their fearless tone,
⁠How sweet thy concords are!

If out of depths that sin has made,
⁠And would have filled with woe,
We hear above creation's groan
⁠Her music soft and low,
It is that lovely things on earth
⁠The atoning truth declare —
The hallelujah of thy heaven
⁠Receives an answer there.

Thou hast a spring of endless health,
⁠With issues great and wide,
In the free heart that dares to live
⁠Because thy Christ has died;
An element of bliss divine
⁠That passes mortal bound,
And worships with the heavenly host
⁠At every joyful sound.

When through the haunting shades of death
⁠We take our hallowed way,
And see in resurrection dawn
⁠The place where Jesus lay,
Still love to love in quest of him
⁠The word of comfort gives;
Still angels watching at his grave.
⁠Bear witness that he lives.

A gloom may gather as we go,
⁠And sound and sight grow dim;
But day has risen on the paths
⁠That lead his friends to him.
All through the dull decline of sense
⁠And even while we die,
His triumph finds the listening ear
⁠And fills the expecting eye.

We follow him, and earth shines on,
⁠From our faint gaze set free;
Her psalms, that call no more on us,
⁠Pursue their praise of thee.
While thou, on our eternal life
⁠Through all decay intent,
Art keeping for the day of power
⁠Thy human instrument.

Then may our silence in thy hand,
⁠Mid sickness and distress,
Take part in that ascending hymn
⁠Which serves thee none the less;
Till the whole Church's bridal joy,
⁠Unblemish'd and complete,
Shall win a blessed universe
⁠To its Redeemer's feet.

I sewed his sheet, making my mane;
I watched the corpse, myself, alane;
I watched his body, night and day;
No living creature came that way.

I took his body on my back,
And whiles I gaed, and whiles I sat;
I digg'd a grave, and laid him in,
And happ'd him with the sod sae green.

But think na ye my heart was sair,
When I laid the moul' on his yellow hair;
O think na ye my heart was wae,
When I turned about, awa' to gae?

Nae living man I'll love again,
Since that my lovely knight is slain;
Wi' ae lock of his yellow hair
I'll chain my heart for evermair.

A young man loves a maiden,
⁠She somebody else prefers,
That somebody else loves another,
⁠Who makes him by wedlock hers.

The maiden in mere vexation,
⁠Because of the loss she has had,
Weds the first kind soul that offers,
⁠And this makes the young man mad.

'Tis an old, a very old story,
⁠But still it is always new;
And when and wherever it happens,
⁠A man's heart is broken in two.

A pine-tree stands alone on
⁠A bare bleak northern height;
The ice and snow they swathe it,
⁠As it sleeps there, all in white.

'Tis dreaming of a palm-tree,
⁠In a far-off Eastern land,
That mourns, alone and silent,
⁠On a ledge of burning sand.