Love’s Ministries

Love is the mother of all 
     And foldeth all in her arms;
The young lambs come at her call 
     And whiten the cottage farms.
The little children hear her voice
And hearts by the cottage hearth rejoice;
While a thousand tremulous hopes 
     And a thousand fears suppressed,
Brood over their mystic horoscopes, 
     And hallow the very unrest 
     That stirs in the mother's breast,
As deep in the misty future a golden vista opes.

Love broods the nest where the patient bird 
Sits warming a being no life hath stirred
As she waits long weeks for that wonderful thing
Some unknown Power works under her wing.
What image, what shape in her little brain 
     Does her expectation wear?
What hope withholds her from berry and grain
     And the broad expanse of air?
Ah, she may not know, may see no form 
     To her happy dream, but deep in her breast 
A spark of the Infinite Love keeps warm 
     The little heart that warms the nest.

And when, at last, there is something stirs 
     Under her wing, and her fledgelings creep 
     Out of their ante-natal sleep,
What a sudden flutter of joy is hers!
     She ruffles her feathers to make them deep, 
     And light and warm for her plumeless brood;
For she knows, O pale philosophers,
     What scarcely ye know in your gravest mood,
     How the brooding heavens were evolving good
     For the patient waiter whose loving eyes 
     Saw only duty, and not the prize, 
     In weakness enduring, in ignorance wise.

Love touches the poet's golden string
With a feather-tip of her purple wing 
And all his heart begins to sing, 
And his song is the rhythmic voice of all
The wide earth's lovers—of lily, tall, 
Who leans across the garden wall 
     To toss a kiss to the wilding rose:
Of the butterfly wooing some golden bell, 
And the bee who whispers low, to tell 
     His love to every flower that blows;
     And it warbles still more tenderly
     For the sitent maid at the trysting tree, 
     Who blushes red at a coming tread, 
Or, if only the moon peeps in to see.

Love bends o'er the cradle where baby smiles
     Sunned in the light of her tender glance,
     Half remembering, perchance,
That radiant look in the Happy Isles!
Slowly she rocks him, and lowly she sings 
As backward and forward the bonny bed swings.
Over them, rocked by a breeze from the west, 
Are four little birds in the oriole's nest, 
And a gleam of red plumage lies warm above, 
     Like the scarlet mantle on baby's breast;
And blithe is the song of the brooding love, 
     That low for the speechless mother 
     Is softly sung by the other,
While the two full cradles in cadence move
     As one wave follows another.

Love comes with a garland of fadeless flowers 
Immortelles plucked from the orient bowers
     Of her unlost Paradise,
And lays it over the thin, white hair 
Of the mother of mothers, supremely fair,
While the soft warm light of a setting sun 
     Is mixed in her fading eyes,
With the beams of a better day begun 
     In her faith's unclouded skies.
A reverent kiss falls, light as snow, 
On the august wrinkles of her brow, 
And the soul by her mother-heart kept young, 
Floats out to the heaven from which it sprung,
And the smile on her lip is the light from the golden portals flung!