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The Human Inheritance

The New Hope, Motherhood. By William Sharp
  
  

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179

TO THE SPIRIT CALLED LAUDANUM.

Calmer of pain that would be agony,
O spirit, who with hands benign doth keep
The tired soul shrouded in a veil of sleep,—
Who silently takes up the last faint sigh
As angels souls of children when they die—
Whose breath is as those waves upon the deep
Born in a tempest but who softly creep
Towards windless calms where motionless they lie.
I feel the silence brooding from thy gaze,
I see the shadow of thy slumberous wing
Shroud the slow ebb of pain's reluctant tide—
O spirit, whose feet haunt the silent ways
Of sleep and death where voices never ring,
I hear the sea where all tired waves subside.