All as God wills, who wisely heeds

All as God wills, who wisely heeds. John Greenleaf Whittier* (1807-1892). From Whittier’s ‘My Psalm’, written ca. 1859, beginning ‘I mourn no more my vanished years’. It was published as a leaflet in 1859, and then in the Atlantic Monthly (August 1859); and in Whittier’s Home Ballads and Poems (Boston. 1860/61). (It is incorrectly said in JJ, p. 1277, that it appeared in The Panorama, and other Poems, 1856).  The poem is, as the title suggests, his psalm, a reflection on nature, the goodness of God, and the righting of wrong, with an acknowledgment that the difficulties of life are part of God’s plan: That care and trial seem at last, Through Memory’s sunset air, Like mountain-ranges...

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