University of Virginia Library

MY LADY.

As violets, modest, tender-eyed,
The light of their beauty love to hide
In deepest solitudes;
Even thus, to dwell unseen, she chose,
My flower of womanhood, my rose,
My lady of the woods!
Full of the deepest, truest thought,
Doing the very things she ought,
Stooping to all good deeds:
Her eyes too pure to shrink from such,
And her hands too clean to fear the touch
Of the sinfulest in his needs.
There is no line of beauty or grace
That was not found in her pleasant face,
And no heart can ever stir,
With a sense of human wants and needs,

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With promptings unto the holiest deeds,
But had their birth in her.
With never a taint of the world's untruth,
She lived from infancy to youth,
From youth to womanhood:
Taking no soil in the ways she trod,
But pure as she came from the hand of God,
Before His face she stood.
My sweetest darling, my tenderest care!
The hardest thing that I have to bear
Is to know my work is past;
That nothing now I can say or do
Will bring any comfort or aid to you,—
I have said and done the last.
Yet I know I never was good enough,
That my tenderest efforts were all too rough
To help a soul so fine;
So the lovingest angel among them all,
Whose touches fell, with the softest fall,
Has pushed my hand from thine!