Christ to the young man said: “Yet one thing more,
If thou wouldst perfect be;
Sell all thou hast and give it to the poor,
And come and follow me!”
Within this temple, Christ again, unseen,
Those sacred words has said;
And his invisible hands to-day have been
Laid on a young man’s head.
And evermore beside him on his way,
The unseen Christ shall move,
That he may lean upon his arm and say,
“Dost thou, dear Lord, approve?”
Beside him at the marriage feast shall be,
To make the scene more fair;
Beside him in the dark Gethsemane
Of pain and midnight prayer.
O holy trust! O endless sense of rest!
Like the beloved John,
To lay his head upon the Saviour’s breast,
And thus to journey on!
Source: A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion (15th ed.) #569
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth , D.C.L. was born at Portland, Maine, Feb. 27, 1807, and graduated at Bowdoin College, 1825. After residing in Europe for four years to qualify for the Chair of Modern Languages in that College, he entered upon the duties of the same. In 1835 he removed to Harvard, on his election as Professor of Modern Languages and Belles-Lettres. He retained that Professorship to 1854. His literary reputation is great, and his writings are numerous and well known. His poems, many of which are as household words in all English-speaking countries, display much learning and great poetic power. A few of these poems and portions of others have come into common use as hymns, but a hymn-writer in the strict sense of that term he… Go to person page >
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