Poems and Lancashire Songs :: :: University of Virginia Library

Ah, this wild voyage o'er the sea of life
Needs all the help that heaven to earth can give;
Through its dark storms, and shoals, and battle-strife
God must be pilot to the ships that live.

II

Happy the heart that finds a haven of love,
Where in the tempest it can sweetly moor,
And taste, below, the bliss that but above,
Is ever stainless, and is ever sure.

III

And blest the hearth where pure affections glow—
The husband's and the father's best retreat;
Where heavenward souls in one direction grow,
With darling tendrils round them twining sweet.

IV

Such be thy home; through earth's mutations strange,
A garden, where the flowers of heaven grow;
And, sheltered there from blight, through every change,
Its loves, its hopes, no touch of ruin know.

V

May Time, whose withering finger ever brings,
To Nature's best the doom of sure decline,
Float over thee with gently-fanning wings,
And find the twilight of thy life divine.

VI

And, ever hand in hand, along your path,—
For thee and thine thus doth the poet pray,—
That ye may walk in joy from life to death,
And earth's night be the dawn of heaven's day.