The Evening Tribune

AN AUTUMN EVENING.

Gray is the sky and gray the fading land,

And a thin rim of starved gray fainting light

On the bleak ridges flickers, that ring round

This pastoral hollow with its long green lanes,

Its ashen shadows and mute slumbering farms.

Slow through the meadows steals the leaden stream,

From the plowed upland to the reedy elms

Dumb floats the rooky host dejectedly.

As though in the surprised and stricken air

A hand invisible for silence waved.

About the lonesome grange upon the hill

The rising wind of twilight moans and sighs,

Searching for something lost or some one gone,

And on a low branch of the nearest pine

Plains autumn's trembling bird disconsolate.

This saddened vale was once a shrine of light.

A radiant figure ranged its solitude

And filled the quiet with intensity.

Here the most heavenly of the mornings

dawned,

Through placid splendors, in the heights of eve,

The chanting dusky choirs sailed stately home,

And all the bushes brimmed with bubbling song.

Still--life's eclipse cannot mean endless night.

The love, the tenderness, the lofty trust,

The fair imaginations that all made

The secret of joy of the wide simple world

Fall not to moldered ruin like the woods,

Nor perish as a drifted cloud that melts

Upon the blanched horizon's outmost verge,

But breathe and soar and brighten, strong and free,

Untroubled, pure, immortal, near or far,

There where we know that the Redeemer liveth,

And the lost angels of our heart see God.

--Joseph Truman in Spectator