Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. 1895.

George Francis Savage-Armstrong b. 1845

My Guide

SHE leads me on through storm and calm,

My glorious Angel girt with light;

By dazzling isles of tropic balm,

By coasts of ice in northern night.

Now far amid the mountain shades

Her footprints gleam like golden fire,

And now adown the leafy glades

I chase the music of her lyre.

And now amid the tangled pines

That darkly robe the gorgeous steep

She beckons where in woven lines

The sunbeams through the darkness creep,

And shows in glimpses far below

The champaign stretching leagues away,

Fair cities veil’d in summer’s glow

Or sparkling in the cloudless ray.

At times on seas with tempest loud,

The pilot of my bark, she stands,

And, through the rifts of driving cloud,

To tranquil bays of bounteous lands,

The grassy creek, the bowery shore,

The fringe of many a charmed realm,

She steers me safe by magic lore,

Her white arm leaning on the helm.

When, sick at heart and worn, mine eyes

I bend to earth in long despair,

She lifts her finger to the skies,

The violet deeps of lucid air,

The myriad myriad orbs that roll

In endless throngs in living space,

And all the vision of her soul

Is mirror’d in her radiant face.