Oh touch it not that hope so blest
Which cheers the fainting heart,
And points it to the coming rest
Where sorrow has no part.

Tear from heart each worldly prop,
Unbind each earthly string;
But to this blest and glorious hope,
Oh let my spirit cling.

It cheer’d amid the days of old
Each holy patriarch’s breast,
It was an anchor to their souls,
Upon it let me rest.

When wand’ring in the dens and caves,
In goat and sheep skins drest,
Apeel’d and scatter’d people learn’d
To know this hope was blest.

Help me to love this blessed hope;
My heart’s a fragile thing;
Will you not nerve and bear it up
Around this hope to cling.

Help amid this world of strife
To long for Christ to reign,
That when he brings the crown of life
I may that crown obtain.

We sit side by side,
brother and sister, and read
the book of what will be, while a breeze
blows the pages over—
desolate odd, cheerful even,
and otherwise. When we come
to our own story, the happy beginning,
the ending we don’t know yet,
the ten thousand acts
encumbering the days between,
we will read every page of it.
If an ancestor has pressed
a love-flower for us, it will lie hidden
between pages of the slow going,
where only those who adore the story
ever read. When the time comes
to shut the book and set out,
we will take childhood’s laughter
as far as we can into the days to come,
until another laughter sounds back
from the place where our next bodies
will have risen and will be telling
tales of what seemed deadly serious once,
offering to us oldening wayfarers 
the light heart, now made of time
and sorrow, that we started with.