Dearest! oh, would I might counsel the hours,
Saying, “Keep back your best sunshine for one
That is coming behind me, and spare her the showers!”
Fain would I stop to remove from thy way
Stones that have bruised me, and thorns that have grieved;
Set up my errors for waymarks, to say —
Here I was wounded, ensnared, or deceived!
Vain is my wishing! in lines of our own
We must traverse the pathway marked out from above;
Life is a sorrowful teacher, alone
We must learn its deep lessons — unaided by Love.
Yet where I journey waste places among,
I will scatter a seed by the wayside, and say,
Soft to myself as I hasten along —
"It may be a flower when she cometh this way;"
Yet will I leave thee some token, that there,
Just where the path looks most rugged and dim,
It haply may cheer thee in meeting with Care,
To know that thy friend walked before thee with Him!
So for thy loving and trusting and truth,
Gentle acquittance in part it may be;
Thou who hast shrined me an image of Youth,
Brighter than ever my youth was to me!
– Published in The Union Sentinel, Osceola,
Iowa, Saturday, October 17, 1862, p. 1. There was a large hole in
the newspaper consuming approximately 95% of this article. This poem, entitled “To A Young Girl” by Dora
Greenwell appears in “Poems, by the author of 'The Patience of Hope,’” p. 84-5,
and I have used that work to reconstruct this article. The last two stanzas do not appear in the
newspaper but they have been included here.
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