How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! Even as the flowers in spring, to which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away Like snow 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 underground, 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.
These are thy wonders, Lord of power, Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell and up to heaven in an hour; Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amiss This or that is; Thy word is all, if we could spell.