Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/483

 BENJAMIN ST. JAMES FRY. Benjamin St. James Fry has been a resident of Ohio since he was three years of age, but he was born at Knoxville, Tennessee, on the sixteenth day of June, 1824. He received a hberal education at Woodward College, in Cincinnati, and then pre- pared for the ministry, and became a member of the Ohio Conference of the Method- ist Episcopal Church. He is now President of the Worthington College for Yoong Women. Mr. Fry began his literary career as a contributor to the Cincinnati Daily Times, about the year 1840. In 1844 he was joint editor and publisher, with Austin T. Earle, of the Western Rambler, one of the many unsuccessful literary magazines which too hopeful young men have undertaken in the West. He is the author of several prose works, and is a contributor to The Methodist Quarterly Review, at New York, and the Ladies' Repository, at Cincinnati. DROOP NOT. " O Child of sorrow, toihng o'er life's way. Droop not ! " I heard a white-robed angel say; " And God shall give thee yet a triumph- day. " Tyrants may pierce thee with the keen- est steel. And rack thy body till the brain shall reel. But God shall guide it for thy lasting weal. " Who falls for God and man, he never dies. But, deathless, liveth ever in the skies, A king among the saint's of paradise. " And if they hide thee from the sun's bright gleams, Though prison bars may rend thy fondest dreams. They cannot shut thee from the Spirit- beams. " They sleep not listless on a bed of down. Who win the lasting plaudit of renown, But wear, with joy, the martyr's thorny crown. " Thy Master drank a bitter cup for thee. And canst thou hope the eternal King to see, If from his bloody cross thy soul would flee? " List, ye ! Thy brother man, with soul sublime. That lived within the olden Jewish clime. And prophesied the stately march of time : " His glowing Spirit pages thus I read : In the dim morning sow thy preciou-s seed. Nor let the evening shades retard thy speed. '• And though death's shafts shall lay thy body cold. The God of hosts, who reigneth as of old, Shall give thee better harvest than earth's gold. ( 4(7 )