Life’s Heaviest Loss
Upon the white sea sand
There sat a pilgrim band,
Telling the losses that their lives had known,
While evening waned away
From breesy cliff and bay,
And the strong tides went out with weary moan.
Some talked of vanished gold;
Some, of proud honors told;
Some spoke of friends that were their trust no more,
And one, of a green grave
Beside a foreign wave,
That made him sit so lonely on the shore.
But when their tales were done,
There spake among them one,
A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free:
“Sad losses have ye met,
But mine is heavier yet,
For a believing heart hath gone from me!”
“Alas,” those pilgrims said,
“For the living and the dead;
For fortune’s cruelty and love’s sure cross;
For the wrecks of land and sea!
But, however it came to thee,
Thine, stranger, is life’s last and heaviest loss.”
—Francis Brown.
The Hour Of Decision
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right;
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
—James Russell Lowell.
Alternate Reading: Matthew 13: 36-52.