Explore "Sweet Hours" by Carmen Sylva on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Oh, do not say that thanklessness has been / Thy sole reward! What? Wouldst thou be rewarded? / When God had laid the gift into thy heart, / Thy hand, upon the road thou hadst to tread? / Lay all thy thanks before the feet of him / Who did not shun thy help, thy gift, thy love, / But bore the humiliation and the weakness, / And bared his heart before thy human gaze, / The heart where none but God e'er read the truth, / The burning record of despair. Be humble, / Thyself, and touch not roughly, where the wound / Is open, see the beads of anguish on / The furrowed brow, the tightdrawn lips, and hear / The tremor in the whispered words, that roll / So heavily from off the heart, and leave / It crushed, sometimes for ever. Dost thou know / What lifeblood it hath cost to speak to thee, / What tortured nights have gone before, what cry / Of anguish rose towards that God, who seemed / So merciless to him and overkind / To thee, allowing thee to be his angel, / To answer when a living word of love / Had to be spoken, and a hand put out to help.
Make him forget what he has told thee, / Let him not feel that thou hast not forgotten, / But make him help thee in his turn, when thine / The pain, the care, the fear; allow him then / To tend thee, and to pay his debt to thy / Humility, and to thy thankfulness.