And thank you for the lessons your fifty years are teaching, For honest lives that louder speak than half our noisy preaching; For your steady faith and courage in that dark and evil time, When the Golden Rule was treason, and to feed the hungry, crime; For the poor slave's house of refuge when the hounds were on his track, And saint and sinner, church and state, joined hands to send him back. Blessings upon you!--What you did for each sad, suffering one, So homeless, faint, and naked, unto our Lord was done! Fair fall on Kennett's pleasant vales and Longwood's bowery ways The mellow sunset of your lives, friends of my early days. May many more of quiet years be added to your sum, And, late at last, in tenderest love, the beckoning angel come. Dear hearts are here, dear hearts are there, alike below, above; Our friends are now in either world, and love is sure of love. 1874. HYMN FOR THE OPENING OF PLYMOUTH CHURCH, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA. All things are Thine: no gift have we, Lord of all gifts, to offer Thee; And hence with grateful hearts to-day, Thy own before Thy feet we lay. Thy will was in the builders' thought; Thy hand unseen amidst us wrought; Through mortal motive, scheme and plan, Thy wise eternal purpose ran. No lack Thy perfect fulness knew; For human needs and longings grew This house of prayer, this home of rest, In the fair garden of the West. In weakness and in want we call On Thee for whom the heavens are small; Thy glory is Thy children's good, Thy joy Thy tender Fatherhood. O Father! deign these walls to bless, Fill with Thy love their emptiness, And let their door a gateway be To lead us from ourselves to Thee! 1872. LEXINGTON 1775. No Berserk thirst of blood had they, No battle-joy was theirs, who set Against the alien bayonet Their homespun breasts in that old day. Their feet had trodden peaceful, ways; They loved not strife, they dreaded pain; They saw not, what to us is plain, That God would make man's wrath his praise. No seers were they, but simple men; Its vast results the future hid The meaning of the work they did Was strange and dark and doubtful then. Swift as their summons came they left The plough mid-furrow standing still, The half-ground corn grist in the mill, The spade in earth, the axe in cleft. They went where duty seemed to call, They scarcely asked the reason why; They only knew they could but die, And death was not the worst of all! Of man for man the sacrifice, All that was theirs to give, they gave. The flowers that blossomed from their grave Have sown themselves beneath all skies. Their death-shot shook the feudal tower, And shattered slavery's chain as well; On the sky's dome, as on a bell, Its echo struck the world's great hour. That fateful echo is not dumb The nations listening to its sound Wait, from a century's vantage-ground, The holier triumphs yet to come,--