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Home  »  The Poetical Works In Four Volumes  »  To Avis Keene

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Personal Poems

To Avis Keene

On Receiving a Basket of Sea-Mosses

THANKS for thy gift

Of ocean flowers,

Born where the golden drift

Of the slant sunshine falls

Down the green, tremulous walls

Of water, to the cool, still coral bowers,

Where, under rainbows of perpetual showers,

God’s gardens of the deep

His patient angels keep;

Gladdening the dim, strange solitude

With fairest forms and hues, and thus

Forever teaching us

The lesson which the many-colored skies,

The flowers, and leaves, and painted butterflies,

The deer’s branched antlers, the gay bird that flings

The tropic sunshine from its golden wings,

The brightness of the human countenance,

Its play of smiles, the magic of a glance,

Forevermore repeat,

In varied tones and sweet,

That beauty, in and of itself, is good.

O kind and generous friend, o’er whom

The sunset hues of Time are cast,

Painting, upon the overpast

And scattered clouds of noonday sorrow

The promise of a fairer morrow,

An earnest of the better life to come;

The binding of the spirit broken,

The warning to the erring spoken,

The comfort of the sad,

The eye to see, the hand to cull

Of common things the beautiful,

The absent heart made glad

By simple gift or graceful token

Of love it needs as daily food,

All own one Source, and all are good!

Hence, tracking sunny cove and reach,

Where spent waves glimmer up the beach,

And toss their gifts of weed and shell

From foamy curve and combing swell,

No unbefitting task was thine

To weave these flowers so soft and fair

In unison with His design

Who loveth beauty everywhere;

And makes in every zone and clime,

In ocean and in upper air,

“All things beautiful in their time.”

For not alone in tones of awe and power

He speaks to man;

The cloudy horror of the thunder-shower

His rainbows span;

And where the caravan

Winds o’er the desert, leaving, as in air

The crane-flock leaves, no trace of passage there,

He gives the weary eye

The palm-leaf shadow for the hot noon hours,

And on its branches dry

Calls out the acacia’s flowers;

And where the dark shaft pierces down

Beneath the mountain roots,

Seen by the miner’s lamp alone,

The star-like crystal shoots;

So, where, the winds and waves below,

The coral-branchëd gardens grow,

His climbing weeds and mosses show,

Like foliage, on each stony bough,

Of varied hues more strangely gay

Than forest leaves in autumn’s day;—

Thus evermore,

On sky, and wave, and shore,

An all-pervading beauty seems to say:

God’s love and power are one; and they,

Who, like the thunder of a sultry day,

Smite to restore,

And they, who, like the gentle wind, uplift

The petals of the dew-wet flowers, and drift

Their perfume on the air,

Alike may serve Him, each, with their own gift,

Making their lives a prayer!

1850.