Classic Poem

Love is like a flowing river,
Broad and wondrous fair.
On its breast the sunbeams quiver,
Sparkling everywhere.
How the far cerulean mountains
Smile upon its birth,
As the happy-hearted fountains,
Laughing, dance to earth!

Dwell within its mystic shadows
Visions never told,
Purple isles, elysian meadows,
Realms of cloudy gold.
In its ruffled expanse glassing,
Wanders mutely by
All the holy whiteness, massing
Warm in yonder sky.

Titan power that stream possesses,
Ay, and sorely needs.
Farther down are stagnant places,
Full of tangled weeds,
Sickly with the fragrance vapid
Of the lily's breath,
And the raving, roaring rapid
Strives for life and death.

Comes the gloom of cliffs o'erbending,
And the dizzying whirl,
And the breathless interblending
In a shower of pearl,
'Mid the rainbow's mocking wonders
And the deafening roar
Of a thousand wrangling thunders
Lost for evermore.

Life is like a goodly prairie
Decked with wondrous flowers,
Ever blooming, never chary,
Fresh from Eden bowers.
But the thorns among the roses
Sorely, deeply wound,
And a nearer view discloses
Rough and broken ground.

Slowly from the dreamy river
An enchanted mist
Rises like a spirit, ever
Tinged with amethyst.
Round us blooms a world elysian,
Countless glories blaze;
Such a glamour o'er our vision
Casts that wondrous haze.

Change the amethyst to sable,
All is dark of hue.
Gold, and lo, Aladdin's fable
Bursts upon the view.
Love it is that drapes in anguish
Bliss or earnest strife,
Hopes that gleam, or doubts that languish,
All our life.