Summary: Days and nights are long; life and death continues.<br> ⁓The Voice before the Void<br> “The Crowded Street”<br> William Cullen Bryant<br> Let me move slowly through the street,<br> Filled with an ever-shifting train,<br> Amid the sound of steps that beat<br> The murmuring walks like autumn rain.<br> How fast the flitting figures come!<br> The mild, the fierce, the stony face;<br> Some bright with thoughtless smiles, and some<br> Where secret tears have left their trace.<br> They pass–to toil, to strife, to rest;<br> To halls in which the feast is spread;<br> To chambers where the funeral guest<br> In silence sits beside the dead.<br> And some to happy homes repair,<br> Where children, pressing cheek to cheek,<br> With mute caresses shall declare<br> The tenderness they cannot speak.<br> And some, who walk in calmness here,<br> Shall shudder as they reach the door<br> Where one who made their dwelling dear,<br> Its flower, its light, is seen no more.<br> Youth, with pale cheek and slender frame,<br> And dreams of greatness in thine eye!<br> Goest thou to build an early name,<br> Or early in the task to die?<br> Keen son of trade, with eager brow!<br> Who is now fluttering in thy snare?<br> Thy golden fortunes, tower they now,<br> Or melt the glittering spires in air?<br> Who of this crowd to-night shall tread<br> The dance till daylight gleam again?<br> Who sorrow o’er the untimely dead?<br> Who writhe in throes of mortal pain?<br> Some, famine-struck, shall think how long<br> The cold dark hours, how slow the light,<br> And some, who flaunt amid the throng,<br> Shall hide in dens of shame to-night.<br> Each, where his tasks or pleasures call,<br> They pass, and heed each other not.<br> There is who heeds, who holds them all,<br> In His large love and boundless thought.<br> These struggling tides of life that seem<br> In wayward, aimless course to tend,<br> Are eddies of the mighty stream<br> That rolls to its appointed end.<br>
