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Hurry and rush, and stillness all enforced,
Festival, funeral, labour, and repose,
Luxury, poverty, and love, and hate,
And works of kindliness and awful deeds.
Here death shall enter, there new life shall come,
Here hearts shall blend in happy union,
And there be severed, sorrowful and lone;
Here shall prosperity succeed to loss,
There pain to pleasure, and there rest to toil;
But ever where grief awaits good hovers near,
And where joy sails some ballast must be borne,
Or it will soon capsize.

           All this shall be,
As in the years that we have known of old;
Yet who that greets this dawning of the year
Can surely guess what for himself awaits,
Which shall preponderate, or ease, or care?
God only knows; but, oh! to know He knows,
And orders all with wise, unerring love,
Resolves all questioning to trustfulness.
Together everything shall work for good,
And all shall work towards one glad New Year
That days shall measure not, nor months, a year
When all things shall be new—new heavens, new earth,
Without or sun or sea; where shall be known
No fluctuation between pain and peace,
But infinite variety of joy.