Alone.
“Laugh and the world laughs with you;
Weep and you weep alone.”
In her soul’s secret temple she’s standing alone:
Her being’s real self, in the silence will bow;
O’er that altar, once glowing, cold ashes are strown—
Where sunshine once flooded, the shadows fall now.
Away from the world, and alone with her God,
She kneels in this consecrate place and may weep;
This temple, by coarse sandaled grossness, untrod,
Is never unbarred till the world is asleep.
She leaves there her grief, with its shadowy stole,
Concealing her anguish, with trembling and fear;—Must
laugh, tho’ it lines a black scath on her soul,
For the world will not pay for the sigh and the tear.
Aye, leaves there her sackcloth and shuts to the door;
She puts on the mask for the frivolous world
Her frail barque is launched ’mid its tumult and roar—
Unhelmed, thro’ its mammon-cut channels ’tis hurled.
The laugh, the world echoes, grows empty and hard
When the jingle of gold is the mirth-stirring power;
The soul is, by Avarice, shrivelled and scarred
When it barters for pottage, a heavenly dower.
God fits us, thro’ suffering, for Sympathy’s needs;
’Tis warring with wrong that will win for the Right;
Oft Sorrow’s lone path, to His ripe vineyard, leads—
Christ gave us, through Gethsame, heavenly light.
Go work in His vineyard wherever ’tis needed
And earnestly work for the sake of the need;
Be Fame’s fickle promise forever unheeded,
Unknown, in thy labor, the miser’s low greed.