TRUE AFFECTION.
Reading edition
ILLUSTRATION OF A PICTURE.
Matron in thy golden prime,
Well the world may envy thee;
Thou hast reached the happy time
When life holds her jubilee—
Midway on her pilgrimage,
Looking backward and before,
Where end infancy and age
On her being’s misty shore.
Turning to the past, thine eye
Dwells upon a way of flowers—
Not a cloud upon the sky
’Neath which passed the happy hours.
Clear the vision of the True!—
Standing on the verge of Time,
See! Hope opens to your view
Glories of the better clime!
So the past and present life—
What the tale the present tells?
Childhood—maidenhood—a wife—
Thus the tide of being swells—
Mother! oh all else in this
Fade as stars before the sun,
Thou the highest point of bliss
Yielded to the True hast won.
Love—communion—in these words
All the happiness we know;
Without them the world affords
Nought to bind the heart below;
“True Affection!” with unrest
We the boon demand of all;
Vainly seeking, still unblest—
Strangers at life’s carnival.
Earnest, calm, unchanging love,
With no doubt its light to shade—
Oh, the happiness above
Is but this eternal made!
Thou hast found it—in thine eyes,
In the eyes that look to thine,
As the stars from summer skies
Sweetly do we see it shine.
Exiles from a better sphere
Weary wanderers are we,
Doomed ’mid clouds to linger here,
Source of bliss, unknowing thee!
Save, when from the world apart
Thou upon our gloomy way
Shinest from a kindred heart,
Turning darkness into day!