LAVENDER.
How p r cme we are to hide and hoard Each little token love has stored, To tell of happy hours ; We lay aside with tender care A tattered book, a curl of hair, A bmich of f.iJed ibwers, When Death has led with pulseless hand Our darlings Ip the siloct land, Awlifle we sit Dereft. But time goes on, and anon we rise, Our dead being buried from oureye3, We gather what i 3 left. The books they loved, the songs they sung, The little flute whose music rung do cheerfully of old; The pictures we have seen them paiufc, Thrt last plucked flower, with odour faint, That fell from fingers cold. We smoolh and fold with rnvoront care The robes they, living, used to wear; And piinful pulses stir As o'or tlio relics of our dead With bitter rain of tean we spread i Pale, purple lavender. And when we come in after years 1 With only teuder April tears On cheeks once white with care, To look on treasures put away Despairing on that far-off day, A eubtlo scent ia there. Dew-wet and fresh wo g ither them, These fragrant flowers ; now overy stem Ia bare of All its bloom. Tear- wet and sweet we strewed them here To lend our relics sacred— dear— Their beautiful perfume. Their scent abides on book and lute, On curl and flower ; and, with its mute But) eloquent appeal, It wins for us a deeper sob For our lo&t dead— a sharper throb Than we are wont to feel. It whispers of the long ago, Its love, its 1098, its aching woe, And buried sorrows Btir ; And teara like those we shed of old lioll down our cheeks as we behold Our faded lavender. -"All the Year Bound."
— " Unco uncertain blessings and muckle certain care," was the dry response once given by an old Scotch lady to a gushing yoimg matron who was enlarging on the well-known saying, "Bairns are blessings,"
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Bibliographic details
Otago Witness, Issue 1928, 2 November 1888, Page 32
Word Count
331LAVENDER. Otago Witness, Issue 1928, 2 November 1888, Page 32
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