My Sorrow's Sign

O murmurous Spirit of the Pine!
Thou seem'st to droop and nestle nigh.
Hast thou, then, read my sorrow's sign?

What grief of thine dost thou resign
To echo here my soul's low cry,
O murmurous Spirit of the Pine?

What need for me to build a shrine
To stay the people passing by,
If thou hast read my sorrow's sign?

Thou hast no marble mark to thine;
Like mine, thy grief is always shy,
O murmurous Spirit of the Pine!

No shaft shall rise to measure mine,
Nor need the cold world marvel why,
Since thou hast read my sorrow's sign.

For mine, the stars shall rise and shine
Until the constellations die;
For thou hast read my sorrow's sign,
O murmurous Spirit of the Pine!

— JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.


Learn Affliction's Lesson

If you would not have affliction visit you twice, listen at once to what it teaches. — JAMES BURGH.

Affliction Endears the Promises

We never prize the precious words of promise till we are placed in conditions in which their suitability and sweetness are manifested. We all of us value those golden words: "When thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee." But few if any of us have read them with the delight of the martyr, Bilney, to whom this passage was a stay while he was in prison, awaiting his execution at the stake. His Bible, still preserved in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has the passage marked with a pen in the margin. Perhaps, if all were known, every promise in the Bible has borne a special message to some one saint; and so the whole volume might be scored in the margin with mementos of Christian experience, every one appropriate to the very letter. — SPURGEON.

God's Mercy

1902

The more we fear crosses the more reason we have to think that we need them. Let us not be discouraged when the hand of God layeth heavy woes upon us. We ought to judge of the violence of our disease by the violence of the remedies which our spiritual physician prescribes for us. It is a great argument for our own wretchedness and of God's mercy that, notwithstanding the difficulty of our recovery He vouchsafes to undertake our cure. Let us, then, draw from our afflictions a source of love, of comfort and trust in God, saying with His apostle: "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." "Blessed are they that mourn, and sow in tears, because they shall reap with joy the harvest of eternal glory." — Fenelon.

Ira D. Sankey's Affliction

1903

Singer and Evangelist Will Probably Lose Sight In His Eye

New York, March 7. — The family of Ira D. Sankey has issued a statement prepared by an eye specialist who has been attending the evangelist. It says the evangelist's affliction was caused by overwork, and concludes with the statement that in the right eye the recovery of a moderate amount of sight is probable, but that "the left eye has not responded to treatment as the other has done, and at this time any anticipation that sight in this eye will be restored is hardly justifiable."