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With drooping head and branches crossed

The twilight forest grieves, Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost From all its sunlit leaves.

The blue sky is the temple's arch,
Its transept earth and air,
The music of its starry march
The chorus of a prayer.

So Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began,
And all her signs and voices shame
The prayerless heart of man.

THE PRESsed gentIAN.

THE time of gifts has come again, And, on my northern window-pane, Outlined against the day's brief light, A Christmas token hangs in sight. The wayside travellers, as they pass, Mark the gray disk of clouded glass; And the dull blankness seems, perchance,

Folly to their wise ignorance.

They cannot from their outlook see
The perfect grace it hath for me;
For there the flower, whose fringes
through

The frosty breath of autumn blew,
Turns from without its face of bloom
To the warm tropic of my room,
As fair as when beside its brook
The hue of bending skies it took.

So, from the trodden ways of earth, Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth,

And offer to the careless glance
The clouding gray of circumstance.
They blossom best where hearth-fires
burn,

To loving eyes alone they turn
The flowers of inward grace, that
hide

Their beauty from the world outside.

But deeper meanings come to me, My half-immortal flower, from thee!

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