Dear places of the playtime of their youth! Gray river, with its everlasting flood, Libation from the mountain to the sea; The wharves, the ships, the sailors, travelled men, Motley in garb and polyglot in speech; The lading landed or to be embarked-- Mysterious bales of costly merchandise Tempting to guess what treasures might be there!-- The hallowed sabbath in that Hebrew home Islanded in its sea of heathenism! The sabbath seasons in the synagogue! The reverend Scriptures of the Jewish law, By father and by mother taught to them, So diligently taught, day after day, And talked of in their ears, alike when they Sat in their house and when they walked abroad, And when they laid them down and when they rose; Beheld too for a sign bound on the hand, Likewise for frontlets worn between the eyes!-- All these things like a flood-tide of the sea Swelled on those homesick kindred hearts, while they, Brother and sister, distant many years From what they saw, from what much more they felt, Seen or unseen, on that familiar shore, Alien and heathen, yet, being native, sweet, Lapsed into musing of the pensive past. Half they in words, but half in silence, mused. "Far-off by years, yet more by difference far," Said Paul to Rachel, "are we two withdrawn From what we were in our Cilician home. That dearer is to us to dream of so, Remembering and imagining, than it were To see; it is not what we knew it once, With the child's heart we carried in us then. We should not find the places that we loved; Nay, for we should not know them--with these eyes. They have not so much changed, but we have changed." "Yea, doubtless, changed we are," Rachel replied; "Yet, I at least, O Saul, not so much changed But that it would delight me still to see Those haunts of happy childhood--more endeared To me, as to my brother more, I know, From father's and mother's memory hovering there. I loved my mother and I honored her, But my own motherhood has taught me how I might have better loved and honored her!" "We must not at past failures vainly pine"-- So Paul, to Rachel sorrowing tenderly-- "But rather let them make us wiser now. Thy lesson, sister, let it teach us both How to be children to our Father God. These earthly kinships all are parable Of the enduring kinships of the skies. We are to be to God, as children dear, What parents would their children were to them, So full of love with fear, of trust with heed, And imitators of His heavenly ways."