ALABASTER BOXES

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 26, 1901

If e’er an alabaster box Of tenderness and love you own, I pray you keep it not sealed up Until your friends are dead and gone.

O fill their lives with sweetness now, And speak approving, cheering words While you may thrill the beating heart, And wake sweet music from its chords.

If fragrant flowers you mean to send, To deck their coffins when they die, O send them now, to cheer their homes, Ere to their final rest they fly.

If any friend has laid away An alabaster box for me, And full of fragrant sympathy, To break when I shall cease to be,

I’d rather he would bring it out, In life’s long, weary, troubled hours, And open it, that it may there Refresh and cheer my sinking powers.

O give to me a coffin plain, With ne’er a flower to deck my bed; A funeral with no eulogy, Before a life whence love hath fled.

O let us learn our friends t’ anoint, With love for burial, ere we part; Post-mortem kindness can not cheer, Nor lift the burden from the heart.

Take, then, this lesson to your heart: That sweetest flowers on coffins thrown Can cast no fragrance backward o’er The weary years forever flown. — Selected.