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In Memoriam - Alice Fane Gunn Stenhouse

by Henry Kendall

The grand, authentic songs that roll

Across grey widths of wild-faced sea,

The lordly anthems of the Pole,

Are loud upon the lea.

Yea, deep and full the South Wind sings

The mighty symphonies that make

A thunder at the mountain springs

A whiteness on the lake.

And where the hermit hornet hums,

When Summer fires his wings with gold,

The hollow voice of August comes,

Across the rain and cold.

Now on the misty mountain tops,

Where gleams the crag and glares the fell,

Wild Winter, like one hunted, stops

And shouts a fierce farewell.

Keen fitful gusts shoot past the shore

And hiss by moor and moody mere

The heralds bleak that come before

The turning of the year.

A sobbing spirit wanders where

By fits and starts the wild-fire shines;

Like one who walks in deep despair,

With Death amongst the pines.

And ah! the fine, majestic grief

Which fills the heart of forests lone,

And makes a lute of limb and leaf

Is human in its tone.

Too human for the thought to slip

How every song that sorrow sings

Betrays the broad relationship

Of all created things.

Man's mournful speech, the wail of tree,

The words the winds and waters say,

Make up that general elegy,

Whose burden is decay.

To-night my soul looks back and sees,

Across wind-broken wastes of wave,

A widow on her bended knees

Beside a new-made grave.

A sufferer with a touching face

By love and grief made beautiful;

Whose rapt religion lights the place

Where death holds awful rule.

The fair, tired soul whose twofold grief

For child and father lends a tone

Of pathos to the pallid leaf

That sighs above the stone.

The large beloved heart whereon

She used to lean, lies still and cold,

Where, like a seraph, shines the sun

On flowerful green and gold.

I knew him well the grand, the sweet,

Pure nature past all human praise;

The dear Gamaliel at whose feet

I sat in other days.

He, glorified by god-like lore,

First showed my soul Life's highest aim;

When, like one winged, I breathed before

The years of sin and shame.

God called him Home. And, in the calm

Beyond our best possessions priced,

He passed, as floats a faultless psalm,

To his fair Father, Christ.

But left as solace for the hours

Of sorrow and the loss thereof;

A sister of the birds and flowers,

The daughter of his love.

She, like a stray sweet seraph, shed

A healing spirit, that flamed and flowed

As if about her bright young head

A crown of saintship glowed.

Suppressing, with sublime self-slight,

The awful face of that distress

Which fell upon her youth like blight,

She shone like happiness.

And, in the home so sanctified

By death in its most noble guise,

She kissed the lips of love, and dried

The tears in sorrow's eyes.

And helped the widowed heart to lean,

So broken up with human cares,

On one who must be felt and seen

By such pure souls as hers.

Moreover, having lived, and learned

The taste of Life's most bitter spring,

For all the sick this sister yearned

The poor and suffering.

But though she had for every one

The phrase of comfort and the smile,

This shining daughter of the sun

Was dying all the while.

Yet self-withdrawn held out of reach

Was grief; except when music blent

Its deep, divine, prophetic speech

With voice and instrument.

Then sometimes would escape a cry

From that dark other life of hers

The half of her humanity

And sob through sound and verse.

At last there came the holy touch,

With psalms from higher homes and hours;

And she who loved the flowers so much

Now sleeps amongst the flowers.

By hearse-like yews and grey-haired moss,

Where wails the wind in starts and fits,

Twice bowed and broken down with loss,

The wife, the mother sits.

God help her soul! She cannot see,

For very trouble, anything

Beyond this wild Gethsemane

Of swift, black suffering;

Except it be that faltering faith

Which leads the lips of life to say:

'There must be something past this death

Lord, teach me how to pray!'

Ah, teach her, Lord! And shed through grief

The clear full light, the undefiled,

The blessing of the bright belief

Which sanctified her child.

Let me, a son of sin and doubt,

Whose feet are set in ways amiss

Who cannot read Thy riddle out,

Just plead, and ask Thee this;

Give her the eyes to see the things

The Life and Love I cannot see;

And lift her with the helping wings

Thou hast denied to me.

Yea, shining from the highest blue

On those that sing by Beulah's streams,

Shake on her thirsty soul the dew

Which brings immortal dreams.

So that her heart may find the great,

Pure faith for which it looks so long;

And learn the noble way to wait,

To suffer, and be strong.