The Flower

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snows in May, As if there were no such cold thing. Who would have thought my shrivelled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite under ground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown; Where they together All the hard weather, Dead to the world, keep house unknown.…