What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.

The gift without the giver is rare.

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail.

Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold.

Be He nowhere else, God is in all that liberates and lifts, in all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles.

Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.

'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. True it is that Death's face seems stern and cold When he is sent to summon those we love; But all God's angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after another, lift their frowning masks, And we behold the Seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the Glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of God.