CRUCÈ AND CORONA.
117
But in one moment of her anguish keenRush visions of the past upon her soul.The hopes, the fears, the joys, of buried years;The care Divine on all her life bestowed.Faith's star dispels the clouds of dark despair.Then in the mighty rush of roaring waves,The thunders' awful and death-threat'ning sound,She hears the footsteps of her Father-God,And calmly, quietly as little childWould seat itself upon some grassy knollTo watch its father's labors, so doth sheSit down upon that tempest-beaten reef,Her little one still cradled in her arms,In childhood's ill-unconscious peaceful rest.
Broad sheets of lightning spread across the heav'ns,And by its light a cavern she beholdsWithin a cliff that towers overhead.A Heav'n-sent thought comes quickly to her soul;She bows her head in pray'r, and, rising now,Bends earnest gaze upon her sleeping child;Then, reaching high, she lays it in the cave.She may not come there, for no human feet,Amid the darkness of tempestuous night,Can pass the rocky paths that thither lead;And, praying still, she stands upon the reef.
