TURN NOT AWAY.

———

BY HENRY MORFORD.

———

If a voice from the far and happy land

Ever echoed over thy cradle bed;

If a mother’s voice and a mother’s hand

Ever laid a blessing upon thy head;

If a golden truth from the sacred page,

Ever was thine in an earlier day,

And still lives on in thy riper age—

Turn not away.

If hope beat high when thy youth began—

Bright hope and love for thy human kind—

And cares have pressed on the heart of man

Till love is weary and hope is blind;

If still one star of all the host,

Burns with an old remembered ray,

Believe not all of thy life is lost—

Turn not away.

If sickness calls thee with feeble cry,

Or suffering moans from its bed of pain;

If a pleading comes from the sunken eye,

Or madness shrieks from the fevered brain;

Oh! watch, as the angels watch above,

Oh! pray for them as the angels pray;

Bring heart and hand to the labor of love—

Turn not away.

If poverty stands at thy cottage door—

Squalid poverty, faint and weak—

Begging a crust from thy little store.

Or the poor, cheap rest that the weary seek;

Remember thou, that the mighty wheel

Of fortune changes, day by day;

Never be deaf to the poors’ appeal—

Turn not away.

If thy brother fall in the slippery path,

And his hands are stained with human sin,

If the sword of the world is raised in wrath,

And no city of refuge invites him in;

If his pitiful cry come up to thee,

Remember that all men go astray,

Still let thy heart his refuge be—

Turn not away.

If life grows dark as thy years roll by,

And Heaven is veiled in cloud and storm,

Oh! still look up with a trusting eye,

For a beckoning smile from an angel form;

So shall thy heart keep its holy laws,

Fulfilling its mission day by day,

And God, when thou pleadest thy final cause—

Turn not away.