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Title: To Woman
Author: Walter R. Cassels [
More Titles by Cassels]
Beautiful Spirit! Angel of the Earth!
That glidest through the storm-tost world,
And bearest
Blessings of peace and rest unto the weak,
Giddy and faint within its vortex whirled;
O! fairest,
Sweetest Pilot of the wavering soul
Through the wide-yawning gulfs and shoals of crime,
Whence issue siren-spells that seek
To sink the wayward in their noxious slime;
Emblem of Purity!
That like the star of Bethlehem dost lume
The wise of heart through this life's deepest gloom
To hope, and joy, and blessedness,
Hail to thee!
Thou art the Priestess of all Holiness!
Standing midway betwixt the earth and heaven,
Part shared of either,
Mortality inwrought with purer leaven,
Good sympathies, sweet thoughts, and stainless love,
That like distilled perfume float above
To charm the breather!
O vision of soft eyes and flowing hair,
Mild gentle eyes that chasten as they glance,
And on their dewy brightness ever bear
The heart's warm language writ in radiance!
O blessed smiles! heaven's golden sunrays shed
On life's cold stream,
Renewed summer when the old is fled
Like a dream!
O voice tinct with the spirit's sweetness,
Last tone of heaven's clear harmonies
Ere in the silence of wide space it dies,
Music's completeness!
O gentle laughters! rising from the crystal spring
Of joyance and free-hearted sympathy,
Pure rills to trickle sunnily
From eyes and rosy lips in liquid warbling,
Sweetly ye win us
To shrine the blest spirit of Beauty
Within us!
O tender heart! Love's everlasting dwelling,
Beautiful fountain of all generous thoughts,
From whose unsealed fulness, ever welling,
Come to mankind their purest pleasure draughts;
O gentle heart! Grief's only sanctuary,
Safe refuge from the rude assaults of woe,
Throbbing with mild compassion constantly,
That never change nor withering can know;
From the pure spring of virgin slumbers
Peace falls upon the soul when thou art by,
Lulling it sweeter than Philomel's numbers,
Lapping it deep within felicity.
O brightest! dearest! still there floats to thee
The incense of pure minds eternally,
Thoughts sown of loveliness, that bud and bloom,
And through the summer-time of after years
Shed sweet perfume,
Love-imaginings that rise through tears
Like rainbows, and soft dreams
That are the heaven-gleams,
Caught from the deep
Of Elysian sleep!
[The end]
Walter R. Cassels's poem: To Woman
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