There Is No Unbelief
Three of these, it will be noted, are New Year’s poems, their subject-matter being the usual banal moralizing, without any hint of poetic thought. The others show some skill at versification, and a happy phrase or two, but the only one which possesses even a germ of what may truly be termed poetry is the shortest of all:
WE ALL DO FADE AS A LEAF
You leaves that through the summer long
Such vernal beauty made,
It is your time for fading now:
O! leaves, how do you fade?
Why, in gold and crimson splendor
Ye flutter from the trees.
Great God, we thank Thee evermore
That we do fade like these.
And does such radiant glory
Go with us to the tomb?
Fade! Why if this it is to fade,
God, what is it to bloom?
The earliest discoverable book publication of “There Is No Unbelief” is in a little volume called Flowers by the Wayside, which appeared at Columbus, Ohio, in 1892. Two poems signed by Mrs. Case are included. One is “No Unbelief,” of which only five stanzas are given,
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