The Man of Uz, and Other Poems. L. H. Sigourney
is no low of kine, or bleat of flocks,
The fields are rifled, and the shepherds slain.
The Man of Uz, who stood but yestermorn
Above all compeers—clothed with wealth and power,
To day is poorer than his humblest hind.
A whirlwind from the desert!
All unwarn'd
Its fury came. Earth like a vassal shook.
Majestic trees flew hurtling through the air
Like rootless reeds.
There was no time for flight.
Buried in household wrecks, all helpless lay
Masses of quivering life.
Job's eldest son
That day held banquet for their numerous line
At his own house. With revelry and song,
One moment in the glow of kindred hearts
The lordly mansion rang, the next they lay
Crush'd neath its ruins.
He—the childless sire,
Last of his race, and lonely as the pine
That crisps and blackens 'neath the lightning shaft
Upon the cliff, with such a rushing tide
The mountain billows of his misery came,
Drove they not Reason from her beacon-hold?
Swept they not his strong trust in Heaven away?
List—list—the sufferer speaks.
"The Lord who gave
Hath taken away—and blessed be His name."
Oh Patriarch!—teach us, mid this changeful life
Not to mistake the ownership of joys
Entrusted to us for a little while,
But when the Great Dispenser shall reclaim
His loans, to render them with praises back,
As best befits the indebted.
Should a tear
Moisten the offering, He who knows our frame
And well remembereth that we are but dust,
Is full of pity.
It was said of old
Time conquer'd Grief. But unto me it seems
That Grief overmastereth Time. It shows how wide
The chasm between us, and our smitten joys
And saps the strength wherewith at first we went
Into life's battle. We perchance, have dream'd
That the sweet smile the sunbeam of our home
The prattle of the babe the Spoiler seiz'd,
Had but gone from us for a little while—
And listen'd in our fallacy of hope
At hush of eve for the returning step
That wake the inmost pulses of the heart
To extasy—till iron-handed Grief
Press'd down the nevermore into our soul,
Deadening us with its weight.
The man of Uz
As the slow lapse of days and nights reveal'd
The desolation of his poverty
Felt every nerve that at the first great shock
Was paralyzed, grow sensitive and shrink
As from a fresh-cut wound. There was no son
To come in beauty of his manly prime
With words of counsel and with vigorous hand
To aid him in his need, no daughter's arm
To twine around him in his weariness,
Nor kiss of grandchild at the even-tide
Going to rest, with prayer upon its lips.
Still a new trial waits.
The blessed health
Heaven's boon, thro' which with unbow'd form we bear
Burdens and ills, forsook him. Maladies
Of fierce and festering virulence attack'd
His swollen limbs. Incessant, grinding pains
Laid his strength prostrate, till he counted life
A loathed thing. Dire visions frighted sleep
That sweet restorer of the wasted frame,
And mid his tossings to and fro, he moan'd
Oh, when shall I arise, and Night be gone!
Despondence seized him. To the lowliest place
Alone he stole, and sadly took his seat
In dust and ashes.
She, his bosom friend
The sharer of his lot for many years,
Sought out his dark retreat. Shuddering she saw
His kingly form like living sepulchre,
And in the maddening haste of sorrow said
God hath forgotten.
She with him had borne
Unuttered woe o'er the untimely graves
Of all whom she had nourished—shared with him
The silence of a home that hath no child,
The plunge from wealth to want, the base contempt
Of menial and of ingrate;—but to see
The dearest object of adoring love
Her next to God, a prey to vile disease
Hideous and loathsome, all the beauty marred
That she had worshipped from her ardent youth
Deeming it half divine, she could not bear,
Her woman's strength gave way, and impious words
In her despair she uttered.
But her lord
To deeper anguish stung by her defect
And rash advice, reprovingly replied
Pointing to Him who meeteth out below
Both good and evil in mysterious love,
And she was silenced.
What a sacred power
Hath hallow'd Friendship o'er the nameless ills
That throng our pilgrimage. Its sympathy,
Doth undergird the drooping, and uphold
The foot that falters in its miry path.
It grows more precious, as the hair grows grey.
Time's alchymy that rendereth so much dross
Back for our gay entrustments, shows more pure
The perfect essence of its sanctity,
Gold unalloyed.
How doth the cordial grasp,
Of hands that twined with ours in school days, now
Delight us as