operty reserved to Christ?
One, cherished, grappled to that heart?
--To be alone the Sacrificed?

O Thou who lovest to redeem,
One whom I know lies sore oppressed.
Thou wilt not suffer me to dream
That I can bargain for her rest.

Seven hours I swiftly sleep, while she
Measures the leagues of dark, awake.
O that my dewy eyes might be
Parched by a vigil for her sake!

But O rejected! O in vain!
I cannot give who would not keep.
I cannot buy, I cannot gain,
I cannot give her half my sleep.

FREE WILL

Dear are some hidden things
My soul has sealed in silence; past delights,
Hope unconfessed; desires with hampered wings,
Remembered in the nights.

But my best treasures are
Ignoble, undelightful, abject, cold;
Yet O! profounder hoards oracular
No reliquaries hold.

There lie my trespasses,
Abjured but not disowned. I'll not accuse
Determinism, nor, as the Master {26} says,
Charge even "the poor Deuce."

Under my hand they lie,
My very own, my proved iniquities,
And though the glory of my life go by
I hold and garner these.

How else, how otherwhere.
How otherwise, shall I discern and grope
For lowliness? How hate, how love, how dare,
How weep, how hope?

THE TWO QUESTIONS

"A riddling world!" one cried.
"If pangs must be, would God that they were sent
To the impure, the cruel, and passed aside
The holy innocent!"

But I, "Ah no, no, no!
Not the clean heart transpierced; not tears that fall
For a child's agony; not a martyr's woe;
Not these, not these appal.

"Not docile motherhood,
Dutiful, frequent, closed in all distress;
Not shedding of the unoffending blood;
Not little joy grown less;

"Not all-benign old age
With dotage mocked; not gallantry that faints
And still pursues; not the vile heritage
Of sin's disease in saints;

"Not these defeat the mind.
For great is that abjection, and august
That irony. Submissive we shall find
A splendour in that dust.

"Not these puzzle the will;
Not these the yet unanswered question urge.
But the unjust stricken; but the hands that kill
Lopped; but the merited scourge;

"The sensualist at fast;
The merciless felled; the l