K. R. J

WHERE is the voice gone which so many years,Each year grown sweeter, rose in glorious song,Interpreting to all our hearts and earsEcstasy, passion, pain, the yearning strongOf baffled love, the patience stronger yet,The pang of hope, the sweetness of regret?

How should that perish which seemed born of heavenAnd framed to breathe the meaning of the skies?Can music render back such gift once given;Or bear to know some subtlest harmoniesMust evermore go half expressed, perceived,Forever thwarted and forever grieved?

Heaven did not need her voice; its courts are fullOf choristers angelic trained for praise.No note is lacking in the wonderfulAccording chorus, which, untired, alwaysSings, “Holy, holy, holy!” round the throne;But earth seems dumb to us now it is gone!

God does not grudge us anything of good!And I will dare to fancy when she died,And on the sweet lips which so featly wooedMusic, the guest, to enter and abide,Death laid his hand, and with insistence strongShut in the secret of their power of song,—

That the dear voice, thus sadly dispossessedAnd reft of home, sped forth upon its road,And like a lost and lonely child, in questOf shelter, sought another warm abodeIn human shape,—some gentle, new-born thing,Where it might fold its torn and beaten wing.

And if, long years from now, we catch a strainWhich has the old, familiar, rapturous thrill,We shall smile, saying, “There it is again!It is not dead, it wakes in music still.Hark! how the lovely accents soar and float,A skylark singing from a woman’s throat!”