Autumn Leaves

Chapter 107: TO A FRIEND ON HER BIRTH-DAY.

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About This Book

A compact poetry collection gathers short lyrical and didactic pieces that reflect on mortality, memory, love, duty, and spiritual consolation, often using nature and seasonal imagery to frame moral and emotional insights. Many poems shift between wistful reverie and exhortation, imagining dreamlike flights, harvest metaphors about deeds and consequences, prayers, meditations on motherhood and friendship, and speculative lines about reincarnation and the afterlife. The work mixes tender sentiment, moral counsel, and pastoral description across brief, accessible poems that alternate consolation with sober reminders of life's hardships.

TO A FRIEND ON HER BIRTH-DAY.

Thy years are pearls strung on Life’s chain.
Not counted they by days, nor years.
But numbered by the good thou’st done;
And friend thou needest have no fears
That pearls have ever tarnished been;
Thou’st kept them bright by good thou’st done.
For thou hast many burdens borne,
And thou hast many vict’ries won
In Life’s hard battles for the right.
Thou oft hast had temptations strong,
But thou hast ever conquered them,
And thou hast overcome all wrong.

Congratulations I give thee,
On this, thy happy natal day,
And this shall be my earnest prayer,
That pearls of love be thine alway.