A KING once made a gallery of art,
With portraits of dead friends and living graced;
And at the end, 'neath curtains drawn apart,
An empty marble pedestal was placed.

Here, every day, the king would come, and pace
With eyes well-pleased along the statued hall;
But, ere he left, he turned with saddened face,
And mused before the curtained pedestal.

And once a courtier asked him why he kept
The shadowed niche to fill his heart with dole;
'For absent friends,' the monarch said, and wept;
'There still must be one absent to the soul.'

And this is true of all the hearts that beat;
Though days be soft and summer pathways fair,
Be sure, while joyous glances round us meet,
The curtained crypt and vacant plinth are there.

To-day we stand before our draped recess:
There is none absent-all we love are here;
To-morrow's hands the opening curtains press,
And lo, the pallid pediment is bare!

The cold affection that plain duty breeds
May see its union severed, and approve;
But when our bond is touched, it throbs and bleeds-
We pay no meed of duty, but of love.

As creeping tendrils shudder from the stone,
The vines of love avoid the frigid heart;
The work men do is not their test alone,
The love they win is far the better chart.

They say the citron-tree will never thrive
Transplanted from the soil where it matured;
Ah, would 'twere so that men could only live
Through working on where they had love secured!

'The People of the Book,' men called the Jews-
Our priests are truly ' People of the Word; '
And he who serves the Master must not choose-
He renders feudal service to the Lord.

But we who love and lose will, like the king,
Still keep the alcove empty in the hall,
And hope, firm-hearted, that some day will bring
Our absent one to fill his pedestal.