But God forgets not men because they sleep. The darkness lasts all night and clears the eyes; Then comes the morning and the joy of light. O surely madness hideth not from Him; Nor doth a soul cease to be beautiful In His sight, when its beauty is withdrawn, And hid by pale eclipse from human eyes. Surely as snow is friendly to the spring, A madness may be friendly to the soul, And shield it from a more enduring loss, From the ice-spears of a heart-reaching frost. So, after years, the winter of her life, Came the sure spring to her men had forgot, Closing the rent links of the social chain, And leaving her outside their charmed ring. Into the chill wind and the howling night, God sent out for her, and she entered in Where there was no more sea. What messengers Ran from the door of love-contented heaven, To lead her towards the real ideal home? The sea, her terror, and the wintry wind. For, on a morn of sunshine, while the wind Yet blew, and heaved yet the billowy sea With memories of the night of deep unrest, They found her in a basin of the rocks, Which, buried in a firmament of sea When ocean winds heap up the tidal waves, Yet, in the respiration of the surge, Lifts clear its edge of rock, full to the brim With deep, clear, resting water, plentiful. There, in the blessedness of sleep, which God Gives his beloved, she lay drowned and still. O life of love, conquered at last by fate! O life raised from the dead by Saviour Death! O love unconquered and invincible! The sea had cooled the burning of that brain; Had laid to rest those limbs so fever-tense, That scarce relaxed in sleep; and now she lies Sleeping the sleep that follows after pain. 'Twas one night more of agony and fear, Of shrinking from the onset of the sea; One cry of desolation, when her fear Became a fact, and then,--God knows the rest. O cure of all our miseries--_God knows!_ O thou whose feet tread ever the wet sands And howling rocks along the wearing shore, Roaming the confines of the endless sea! Strain not thine eyes across, bedimmed with tears; No sail comes back across that tender line. Turn thee unto thy work, let God alone; He will do his part. Then across the waves Will float faint whispers from the better land, Veiled in the dust of waters we call storms, To thine averted ears. Do thou thy work, And thou shalt follow; follow, and find thine own.