I was a little gleaner
Of all the days would yield,
When wonder overtook me
At work within the field.

The stars they gathered round me,
Holding their torches high.
They cried, ‘Behold the chosen!’
And it was none but I.

They hailed me royal, kindred,
And made me understand
With gifts of light and darkness
They gave into my hand.

And here the wonder holds me
Though voices all are gone,
Here in the brimming silence,
With this to think upon.

The kiss upon my forehead
Forevermore is mine.
The sweetness fills my heart up;

Nothing, either great or small,
Nothing, sinner, no;
Jesus did it, did it all,
Long, long ago.

When He from His lofty throne
Stooped to do and die,
Everything was fully done;
Hearken to His cry—

“It is finished!” Yes, indeed!
Finished every jot.
Sinner, this is all you need;
Tell me is it not?

Weary, working, burdened one,
Wherefore toil you so?
Cease your doing; all was done
Long, long ago.

Till to Jesus' work you cling,
By a simple faith,
“Doing” is a deadly thing—
“Doing” ends in death.

Renounce the world, old Cassock cries,
With vice and folly it abounds;
But yet, in worldly vanities,
Cassock spends Twenty Thousand Pounds.

Renounce the world, old Cassock cries,
With vice and folly it abounds;
But yet, in worldly vanities,
Cassock spends Twenty Thousand Pounds.

Be this thing written, e'er I write
The record of the Evil time:
That day my soul repented not
One idle hour, one braggart rhyme.

The grass brought up its million spears
Aye—for the honour of our star,
Write that no thorn or thistledown,
Failed me when I went forth to War.

Old tunes of revelry and sport
Danced on my deafening drums of fight
The hoarded sunlight of spring days
Blazed for my beacon all the night

After, the days were grey and long
But for that hour Life battled well,
And all the Trumpets of her tower

There 's a wee, wee glen in the Hielan's,
Where I fain, fain would be;
There's an auld kirk there on the hillside
I weary sair to see.
In a low lythe nook in the graveyard
Drearily stands alane,
Marking the last lair of a' I lo'ed,
A wee moss-covered stane.

There 's an auld hoose sits in a hollow
Half happit by a tree;
At the door the untended lilac
Still blossoms for the bee;
But the auld roof is sairly seggit,
There 's nane now left to care;
And the thatch ance sae neatly stobbit
Has lang been scant and bare.

Three hours, O Christ,
Us to set free
Did thy body hang
On the bitter tree.
Longer, Prometheus,
Thou! Age-long
Did the ridge of Asia
Support thy wrong.
But Man, whom ye loved—
Man, in whose dream
Ye did deliver,
Ye did redeem—
Whose weightless body
At last hath wings,
Leaves not the mount
Of your sufferings:—
Of his own creatures
Become afraid,
Gnawn by the vultures
Himself hath made;
Man, in whom vision
Outsoars the will,
To Earth, war-weary
Is nailèd still.

See an old unhappy bull,
Sick in soul and body both,
Slouching in the undergrowth
Of the forest beautiful,
Banished from the herd he led,
Bulls and cows a thousand head.

Cranes and gaudy parrots go
Up and down the burning sky;
Tree-top cats purr drowsily
In the dim-day green below;
And troops of monkeys, nutting, some,
All disputing, go and come;

And things abominable sit
Picking offal buck or swine,
On the mess and over it
Burnished flies and beetles shine,
And spiders big as bladders lie
Under hemlocks ten foot high;

We who praise poets with our labouring pen
And justify ourselves with laud of men,
Have not the right to call our own our own,
Being but the groundsprouts from those great trees grown.
The crafted art, the smooth curve, and surety
Come not of nature till the apprentice free
Of trouble with his tools, and cobwebbed cuts,
Spies out a path his own and casts his plots.
Then looking back on four-square edifices
And wind-and-weather-standing tall houses
He stakes a court, and tries his unpaid hand,
Begins a life whose salt is arid sand,

I saw him pass as the new day dawned,
Murmuring some musical phrase;
Horses were drinking and floundering in the pond,
And the tired stars thinned their gaze;
Yet these were not the spectacles at all that he conned,
But an inner one, giving out rays.

Such was the thing in his eye, walking there,
The very and visible thing,
A close light, displacing the gray of the morning air,
And the tokens that the dark was taking wing;
And was it not the radiance of a purpose rare
That might ripe to its accomplishing?

Than his chaste wife, though Beast now know no more,
He adulters still: his thoughts lie with a whore.