II.

Yet are there other gifts more fair than thine, Nor can I count him happiest who has never Been forced with his own hand his chains to sever, And for himself find out the way divine; He never knew the aspirer's glorious pains, He never earned the struggle's priceless gains. O, block by block, with sore and sharp endeavor, Lifelong we build these human natures up Into a temple fit for freedom's shrine, And Trial ever consecrates the cup Wherefrom we pour her sacrificial wine.

A REQUIEM.

Ay, pale and silent maiden, Cold as thou liest there, Thine was the sunniest nature That ever drew the air, The wildest and most wayward, And yet so gently kind, Thou seemedst but to body A breath of summer wind.

Into the eternal shadow That girds our life around, Into the infinite silence Wherewith Death's shore is bound, Thou hast gone forth, belovèd! And I were mean to weep, That thou hast left Life's shallows, And dost possess the Deep.

Thou liest low and silent, Thy heart is cold and still, Thine eyes are shut forever, And Death hath had his will; He loved and would have taken, I loved and would have kept, We strove,--and he was stronger, And I have never wept.

Let him possess thy body, Thy soul is still with me, More sunny and more gladsome Than it was wont to be: Thy body was a fetter That bound me to the flesh, Thank God that it is broken, And now I live afresh!

Now I can see thee clearly; The dusky cloud of clay, That hid thy starry spirit, Is rent and blown away: To earth I give thy body, Thy spirit to the sky, I saw its bright wings growing, And knew that thou must fly.

Now I can love thee truly, For nothing comes between The senses and the spirit, The seen and the unseen; Lifts the eternal shadow, The silence bursts apart, And the soul's boundless future Is present in my heart.

A PARABLE.

Worn and footsore was the Prophet, When he gained the holy hill; "God has left the earth," he murmured, "Here his presence lingers still.

"God of all the olden prophets, Wilt thou speak with men no more? Have I not as truly served thee, As thy chosen ones of yore?

"Hear me, guider of my fathers, Lo! a humble heart is mine; By thy mercy I beseech thee, Grant thy servant but a sign!"

Bowing then his head, he listened For an answer to his prayer; No loud burst of thunder followed, Not a murmur stirred the air:--

But the tuft of moss before him Opened while he waited yet, And, from out the rock's hard bosom, Sprang a tender violet.

"God! I thank thee," said the Prophet "Hard of heart and blind was I, Looking to the holy mountain For the gift of prophecy.

"Still thou speakest with thy children Freely as in eld sublime; Humbleness, and love, and patience, Still give empire over time.

"Had I trusted in my nature, And had faith in lowly things, Thou thyself wouldst then have sought me, And set free my spirit's wings.

"But I looked for signs and wonders, That o'er men should give me sway, Thirsting to be more than mortal, I was even less than clay.

"Ere I entered on my journey, As I girt my loins to start, Ran to me my little daughter, The beloved of my heart;--

"In her hand she held a flower, Like to this as like may be, Which, beside my very threshold, She had plucked and brought to me."

1842.

A GLANCE BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

We see but half the causes of our deeds, Seeking them wholly in the outer life, And heedless of the encircling spirit-world, Which, though unseen, is felt, and sows in us All germs of pure and world-wide purposes. From one stage of our being to the next We pass unconscious o'er a slender bridge, The momentary work of unseen hands, Which crumbles down behind us; looking back, We see the other shore, the gulf between, And, marvelling how we won to where we stand, Content ourselves to call the builder Chance, We trace the wisdom to the apple's fall, Not to the birth-throes of a mighty Truth Which, for long ages in blank Chaos dumb, Yet yearned to be incarnate, and had found At last a spirit meet to be the womb From which it might be born to bless mankind,-- Not to the soul of Newton, ripe with all The hoarded thoughtfulness of earnest years, And waiting but one ray of sunlight more To blossom fully.

But whence came that ray? We call our sorrows Destiny, but ought Rather to name our high successes so. Only the instincts of great souls are Fate, And have predestined sway: all other things, Except by leave of us, could never be. For Destiny is but the breath of God Still moving in us, the last fragment left Of our unfallen nature, waking oft Within our thought, to beckon us beyond The narrow circle of the seen and known, And always tending to a noble end, As all things must that overrule the soul, And for a space unseat the helmsman, Will. The fate of England and of freedom once Seemed wavering in the heart of one plain man, One step of his and the great dial-hand, That marks the destined progress of the world In the eternal round from wisdom on To higher wisdom, had been made to pause A hundred years. That step he did not take,-- He knew not why, nor we, but only God,-- And lived to make his simple oaken chair More terrible and grandly beautiful, More full of majesty than any throne Before or after, of a British king.

Upon the pier stood two stern-visaged men, Looking to where a little craft lay moored, Swayed by the lazy current of the Thames, Which weltered by in muddy listlessness. Grave men they were, and battlings of fierce thought Had trampled out all softness from their brows, And ploughed rough furrows there before their time, For another crop than such as homebred Peace Sows broadcast in the willing soil of Youth. Care, not of self, but of the commonweal, Had robbed their eyes of youth, and left instead A look of patient power and iron will, And something fiercer, too, that gave broad hint Of the plain weapons girded at their sides. The younger had an aspect of command,-- Not such as trickles down, a slender stream, In the shrunk channel of a great descent,-- But such as lies entowered in heart and head, And an arm prompt to do the 'hests of both. His was a brow where gold were out of place, And yet it seemed right worthy of a crown, (Though he despised such,) were it only made Of iron, or some serviceable stuff That would have matched his sinewy, brown face. The elder, although he hardly seemed, (Care makes so little of some five short years,) Had a clear, honest face, whose rough-hewn strength Was mildened by the scholar's wiser heart To sober courage, such as best befits The unsullied temper of a well-taught mind, Yet so remained that one could plainly guess The hushed volcano smouldering underneath. He spoke: the other, hearing, kept his gaze Still fixed, as on some problem in the sky.

"O, Cromwell, we are fallen on evil times! There was a day when England had wide room For honest men as well as foolish kings; But now the uneasy stomach of the time Turns squeamish at them both. Therefore let us Seek out that savage clime, where men as yet Are free: there sleeps the vessel on the tide, Her languid canvas drooping for the wind; Give us but that, and what need we to fear This Order of the Council? The free waves Will not say, No, to please a wayward king, Nor will the winds turn traitors at his beck: All things are fitly cared for, and the Lord Will watch as kindly o'er the exodus Of us his servants now, as in old time. We have no cloud or fire, and haply we May not pass dry-shod through the ocean-stream; But, saved or lost, all things are in His hand." So spake he, and meantime the other stood With wide gray eyes still reading the blank air, As if upon the sky's blue wall he saw Some mystic sentence, written by a hand Such as of old made pale the Assyrian king, Girt with his satraps in the blazing feast.

"Hampden! a moment since, my purpose was To fly with thee,--for I will call it flight, Nor flatter it with any smoother name,-- But something in me bids me not to go; And I am one, thou knowest, who, unmoved By what the weak deem omens, yet give heed And reverence due to whatsoe'er my soul Whispers of warning to the inner ear. Moreover, as I know that God brings round His purposes in ways undreamed by us, And makes the wicked but his instruments To hasten on their swift and sudden fall, I see the beauty of his providence In the King's order: blind, he will not let His doom part from him, but must bid it stay As 't were a cricket, whose enlivening chirp He loved to hear beneath his very hearth. Why should we fly? Nay, why not rather stay And rear again our Zion's crumbled walls, Not, as of old the walls of Thebes were built, By minstrel twanging, but, if need should be, With the more potent music of our swords? Think'st thou that score of men beyond the sea Claim more God's care than all of England here? No: when he moves His arm, it is to aid Whole peoples, heedless if a few be crushed, As some are ever, when the destiny Of man takes one stride onward nearer home. Believe it, 'tis the mass of men He loves; And, where there is most sorrow and most want, Where the high heart of man is trodden down The most, 'tis not because He hides his face From them in wrath, as purblind teachers prate. Not so: there most is He, for there is He Most needed. Men who seek for Fate abroad Are not so near his heart as they who dare Frankly to face her where she faces them, On their own threshold, where their souls are strong To grapple with and throw her; as I once, Being yet a boy, did cast this puny king, Who now has grown so dotard as to deem That he can wrestle with an angry realm, And throw the brawned Antæus of men's rights. No, Hampden! they have half-way conquered Fate Who go half-way to meet her,--as will I. Freedom hath yet a work for me to do; So speaks that inward voice which never yet Spake falsely, when it urged the spirit on To noble deeds for country and mankind. And, for success, I ask no more than this,-- To bear unflinching witness to the truth. All true, whole men succeed: for what is worth Success's name, unless it be the thought, The inward surety, to have carried out A noble purpose to a noble end, Although it be the gallows or the block? 'Tis only Falsehood that doth ever need These outward shows of gain to bolster her. Be it we prove the weaker with our swords; Truth only needs to be for once spoke out, And there's such music in her, such strange rhythm, As makes men's memories her joyous slaves, And clings around the soul, as the sky clings Round the mute earth, forever beautiful, And, if o'erclouded, only to burst forth More all-embracingly divine and clear: Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like A star new-born, that drops into its place, And which, once circling in its placid round, Not all the tumult of the earth can shake.

"What should we do in that small colony Of pinched fanatics, who would rather choose Freedom to clip an inch more from their hair, Than the great chance of setting England free? Not there, amid the stormy wilderness, Should we learn wisdom; or if learned, what room To put it into act,--else worse than naught? We learn our souls more, tossing for an hour Upon this huge and ever-vexèd sea Of human thought, where kingdoms go to wreck Like fragile bubbles yonder in the stream, Than in a cycle of New England sloth, Broke only by some petty Indian war, Or quarrel for a letter more or less, In some hard word, which, spelt in either way Not their most learned clerks can understand. New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws that in our fathers' day were best; And, doubtless, after us, some purer scheme Will be shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth. We cannot bring Utopia by force; But better, almost, be at work in sin; Than in a brute inaction browse and sleep. No man is born into the world, whose work Is not born with him; there is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessèd are the horny hands of toil! The busy world shoves angrily aside The man who stands with arms akimbo set, Until occasion tells him what to do; And he who waits to have his task marked out Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled. Our time is one that calls for earnest deeds: Reason and Government, like two broad seas, Yearn for each other with outstretched arms Across this narrow isthmus of the throne, And roll their white surf higher every day. One age moves onward, and the next builds up Cities and gorgeous palaces, where stood The rude log huts of those who tamed the wild, Rearing from out the forests they had felled The goodly framework of a fairer state; The builder's trowel and the settler's axe Are seldom wielded by the selfsame hand; Ours is the harder task, yet not the less Shall we receive the blessing for our toil From the choice spirits of the aftertime. My soul is not a palace of the past, Where outworn creeds, like Rome's gray senate quake, Hearing afar the Vandal's trumpet hoarse, That shakes old systems with a thunder-fit. The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change; Then let it come: I have no dread of what Is called for by the instinct of mankind; Nor think I that God's world will fall apart, Because we tear a parchment more or less. Truth is eternal, but her effluence, With endless change is fitted to the hour; Her mirror is turned forward to reflect The promise of the future, not the past. He who would win the name of truly great Must understand his own age and the next, And make the present ready to fulfil Its prophecy, and with the future merge Gently and peacefully, as wave with wave. The future works out great men's destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever: better those Who lead the blind old giant by the hand From out the pathless desert where he gropes, And set him onward in his darksome way. I do not fear to follow out the truth, Albeit along the precipice's edge. Let us speak plain: there is more force in names Than most men dream of; and a lie may keep Its throne a whole age longer, if it skulk Behind the shield of some fair-seeming name, Let us call tyrants, _tyrants_, and maintain, That only freedom comes by grace of God, And all that comes not by his grace must fall For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

"I will have one more grapple with the man Charles Stuart: whom the boy o'ercame, The man stands not in awe of. I, perchance, Am one raised up by the Almighty arm To witness some great truth to all the world. Souls destined to o'erleap the vulgar lot, And mould the world unto the scheme of God, Have a fore-consciousness of their high doom, As men are known to shiver at the heart, When the cold shadow of some coming ill Creeps slowly o'er their spirits unawares. Hath Good less power of prophecy than Ill? How else could men whom God hath called to sway Earth's rudder, and to steer the bark of Truth, Beating against the tempest tow'rd her port, Bear all the mean and buzzing grievances, The petty martyrdoms, wherewith Sin strives To weary out the tethered hope of Faith, The sneers, the unrecognizing look of friends, Who worship the dead corpse of old king Custom, Where it doth lie in state within the Church, Striving to cover up the mighty ocean With a man's palm, and making even the truth Lie for them, holding up the glass reversed, To make the hope of man seem farther off? My God! when I read o'er the bitter lives Of men whose eager hearts were quite too great To beat beneath the cramped mode of the day, And see them mocked at by the world they love, Haggling with prejudice for pennyworths Of that reform which their hard toil will make The common birthright of the age to come,-- When I see this, spite of my faith in God, I marvel how their hearts bear up so long; Nor could they, but for this same prophecy, This inward feeling of the glorious end.

"Deem me not fond; but in my warmer youth, Ere my heart's bloom was soiled and brushed away, I had great dreams of mighty things to come; Of conquest, whether by the sword or pen I knew not; but some conquest I would have, Or else swift death: now wiser grown in years, I find youth's dreams are but the flutterings Of those strong wings whereon the soul shall soar In aftertime to win a starry throne; And so I cherish them, for they were lots, Which I, a boy, cast in the helm of Fate. Now will I draw them, since a man's right hand, A right hand guided by an earnest soul, With a true instinct, takes the golden prize From out a thousand blanks. What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings. The helm is shaking now, and I will stay To pluck my lot forth; it were sin to flee!"

So they two turned together; one to die, Fighting for freedom on the bloody field; The other, far more happy, to become A name earth wears forever next her heart; One of the few that have a right to rank With the true Makers: for his spirit wrought Order from Chaos; proved that right divine Dwelt only in the excellence of truth; And far within old Darkness' hostile lines Advanced and pitched the shining tents of Light. Nor shall the grateful Muse forget to tell, That--not the least among his many claims To deathless honor--he was Milton's friend, A man not second among those who lived To show us that the poet's lyre demands An arm of tougher sinew than the sword.

1843.

SONG.

O, moonlight deep and tender, A year and more agone, Your mist of golden splendor Round my betrothal shone!

O, elm-leaves dark and dewy, The very same ye seem, The low wind trembles through ye, Ye murmur in my dream!

O, river, dim with distance, Flow thus forever by: A part of my existence Within your heart doth lie!

O, stars, ye saw our meeting, Two beings and one soul, Two hearts so madly beating To mingle and be whole!

O, happy night, deliver Her kisses back to me, Or keep them all, and give her A blissful dream of me!

1842.

A CHIPPEWA LEGEND.[A]

ἀλγεινὰ μέν μοι καὶ λέγειν ἐστὶν τάδε ἄλγος δὲ σιγᾷν. Æschylus, Prom. Vinct. 197.

[Footnote A: For the leading incidents in this tale, I am indebted to the very valuable "Algic Researches" of Henry R. Schoolcraft, Esq.]

The old Chief, feeling now well-nigh his end, Called his two eldest children to his side, And gave them, in few words, his parting charge:-- "My son and daughter, me ye see no more; The happy hunting-grounds await me, green With change of spring and summer through the year: But, for remembrance, after I am gone, Be kind to little Sheemah for my sake: Weakling he is and young, and knows not yet To set the trap, or draw the seasoned bow; Therefore of both your loves he hath more need, And he, who needeth love, to love hath right; It is not like our furs and stores of corn, Whereto we claim sole title by our toil, But the Great Spirit plants it in our hearts, And waters it, and gives it sun, to be The common stock and heritage of all: Therefore be kind to Sheemah, that yourselves May not be left deserted in your need."

Alone, beside a lake, their wigwam stood, Far from the other dwellings of their tribe; And, after many moons, the loneliness Wearied the elder brother, and he said, "Why should I dwell here all alone, shut out From the free, natural joys that fit my age? Lo, I am tall and strong, well skilled to hunt, Patient of toil and hunger, and not yet Have seen the danger which I dared not look Full in the face; what hinders me to be A mighty Brave and Chief among my kin?" So, taking up his arrows and his bow, As if to hunt, he journeyed swiftly on, Until he gained the wigwams of his tribe, Where, choosing out a bride, he soon forgot, In all the fret and bustle of new life, The little Sheemah and his father's charge.

Now when the sister found her brother gone, And that, for many days, he came not back, She wept for Sheemah more than for herself; For Love bides longest in a woman's heart, And flutters many times before he flies, And then doth perch so nearly, that a word May lure him back, as swift and glad as light; And Duty lingers even when Love is gone Oft looking out in hope of his return; And, after Duty hath been driven forth, Then Selfishness creeps in the last of all, Warming her lean hands at the lonely hearth, And crouching o'er the embers, to shut out Whatever paltry warmth and light are left, With avaricious greed, from all beside. So, for long months, the sister hunted wide, And cared for little Sheemah tenderly; But, daily more and more, the loneliness Grew wearisome, and to herself she sighed, "Am I not fair? at least the glassy pool, That hath no cause to flatter, tells me so; But, O, how flat and meaningless the tale, Unless it tremble on a lover's tongue! Beauty hath no true glass, except it be In the sweet privacy of loving eyes." Thus deemed she idly, and forgot the lore Which she had learned of nature and the woods, That beauty's chief reward is to itself, And that the eyes of Love reflect alone The inward fairness, which is blurred and lost Unless kept clear and white by Duty's care So she went forth and sought the haunts of men, And, being wedded, in her household cares, Soon, like the elder brother, quite forgot The little Sheemah and her father's charge.

But Sheemah, left alone within the lodge, Waited and waited, with a shrinking heart, Thinking each rustle was his sister's step, Till hope grew less and less, and then went out, And every sound was changed from hope to fear. Few sounds there were:--the dropping of a nut, The squirrel's chirrup, and the jay's harsh scream, Autumn's sad remnants of blithe Summer's cheer, Heard at long intervals, seemed but to make The dreadful void of silence silenter. Soon what small store his sister left was gone, And, through the Autumn, he made shift to live On roots and berries, gathered in much fear Of wolves, whose ghastly howl he heard ofttimes, Hollow and hungry, at the dead of night. But Winter came at last, and, when the snow, Thick-heaped for gleaming leagues o'er hill and plain, Spread its unbroken silence over all, Made bold by hunger, he was fain to glean, (More sick at heart than Ruth, and all alone,) After the harvest of the merciless wolf, Grim Boaz, who, sharp-ribbed and gaunt, yet feared A thing more wild and starving than himself; Till, by degrees, the wolf and he grew friends, And shared, together all the winter through.

Late in the Spring, when all the ice was gone, The elder brother, fishing in the lake, Upon whose edge his father's wigwam stood, Heard a low moaning noise upon the shore: Half like a child it seemed, half like a wolf, And straightway there was something in his heart That said, "It is thy brother Sheemah's voice." So, paddling swiftly to the bank, he saw, Within a little thicket close at hand, A child that seemed fast changing to a wolf, From the neck downward, gray with shaggy hair That still crept on and upward as he looked. The face was turned away, but well he knew That it was Sheemah's, even his brother's face. Then with his trembling hands he hid his eyes, And bowed his head, so that he might not see The first look of his brother's eyes, and cried, "O, Sheemah! O, my brother, speak to me! Dost thou not know me, that I am thy brother? Come to me, little Sheemah, thou shalt dwell With me henceforth, and know no care or want!" Sheemah was silent for a space, as if 'T were hard to summon up a human voice, And, when he spake, the sound was of a wolf's: "I know thee not, nor art thou what thou say'st; I have none other brethren than the wolves, And, till thy heart be changed from what it is, Thou art not worthy to be called their kin." Then groaned the other, with a choking tongue, "Alas! my heart is changed right bitterly; 'Tis shrunk and parched within me even now!" And, looking upward fearfully, he saw Only a wolf that shrank away and ran, Ugly and fierce, to hide among the woods.

STANZAS ON FREEDOM

Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave? If ye do not feel the chain, When it works a brother's pain, Are ye not base slaves indeed, Slaves unworthy to be freed?

Women! who shall one day bear Sons to breathe New England air, If ye hear, without a blush, Deeds to make the roused blood rush Like red lava through your veins, For your sisters now in chains,-- Answer! are ye fit to be Mothers of the brave and free?

Is true Freedom but to break Fetters for our own dear sake, And, with leathern hearts, forget That we owe mankind a debt? No! true freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!

They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak, They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.

COLUMBUS.

The cordage creaks and rattles in the wind, With freaks of sudden hush; the reeling sea Now thumps like solid rock beneath the stern, Now leaps with clumsy wrath, strikes short, and, falling Crumbled to whispery foam, slips rustling down The broad backs of the waves, which jostle and crowd To fling themselves upon that unknown shore, Their used familiar since the dawn of time, Whither this foredoomed life is guided on To sway on triumph's hushed, aspiring poise One glittering moment, then to break fulfilled.

How lonely is the sea's perpetual swing, The melancholy wash of endless waves, The sigh of some grim monster undescried, Fear-painted on the canvas of the dark, Shifting on his uneasy pillow of brine! Yet night brings more companions than the day To this drear waste; new constellations burn, And fairer stars, with whose calm height my soul Finds nearer sympathy than with my herd Of earthen souls, whose vision's scanty ring Makes me its prisoner to beat my wings Against the cold bars of their unbelief, Knowing in vain my own free heaven beyond. O God! this world, so crammed with eager life, That comes and goes and wanders back to silence Like the idle wind, which yet man's shaping mind Can make his drudge to swell the longing sails Of highest endeavor,--this mad, unthrift world, Which, every hour, throws life enough away To make her deserts kind and hospitable, Lets her great destinies be waved aside By smooth, lip-reverent, formal infidels, Who weigh the God they not believe with gold, And find no spot in Judas, save that he, Driving a duller bargain than he ought, Saddled his guild with too cheap precedent. O Faith! if thou art strong, thine opposite Is mighty also, and the dull fool's sneer Hath ofttimes shot chill palsy through the arm, Just lifted to achieve its crowning deed, And made the firm-based heart, that would have quailed The rack or fagot, shudder like a leaf Wrinkled with frost, and loose upon its stem. The wicked and the weak, by some dark law, Have a strange power to shut and rivet down Their own horizon round us, to unwing Our heaven-aspiring visions, and to blur With surly clouds the Future's gleaming peaks, Far seen across the brine of thankless years. If the chosen soul could never be alone In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God, No greatness ever had been dreamed or done; Among dull hearts a prophet never grew; The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

The old world is effete; there man with man Jostles, and, in the brawl for means to live, Life is trod under-foot,--Life, the one block Of marble that's vouchsafed wherefrom to carve Our great thoughts, white and god-like, to shine down The future, Life, the irredeemable block, Which one o'er-hasty chisel-dint oft mars, Scanting our room to cut the features out Of our full hope, so forcing us to crown With a mean head the perfect limbs, or leave The god's face glowing o'er a satyr's trunk, Failure's brief epitaph. Yes, Europe's world Reels on to judgment; there the common need, Losing God's sacred use, to be a bond 'Twixt Me and Thee, sets each one scowlingly O'er his own selfish hoard at bay; no state, Knit strongly with eternal fibres up Of all men's separate and united weals, Self-poised and sole as stars, yet one as light. Holds up a shape of large Humanity To which by natural instinct every man Pays loyalty exulting, by which all Mould their own lives, and feel their pulses filled With the red fiery blood of the general life, Making them mighty in peace, as now in war They are, even in the flush of victory, weak, Conquering that manhood which should them subdue. And what gift bring I to this untried world? Shall the same tragedy be played anew, And the same lurid curtain drop at last On one dread desolation, one fierce crash Of that recoil which on its makers God Lets Ignorance and Sin and Hunger make, Early or late? Or shall that commonwealth Whose potent unity and concentric force Can draw these scattered joints and parts of men Into a whole ideal man once more, Which sucks not from its limbs the life away, But sends it flood-tide and creates itself Over again in every citizen, Be there built up? For me, I have no choice; I might turn back to other destinies, For one sincere key opes all Fortune's doors; But whoso answers not God's earliest call, Forfeits or dulls that faculty supreme Of lying open to his genius Which makes the wise heart certain of its ends.

Here am I; for what end God knows, not I; Westward still points the inexorable soul: Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea, The beating heart of this great enterprise, Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death; This have I mused on, since mine eye could first Among the stars distinguish and with joy Rest on that God-fed Pharos of the north, On some blue promontory of heaven lighted That juts far out into the upper sea; To this one hope my heart hath clung for years, As would a foundling to the talisman Hung round his neck by hands he knew not whose. A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside, Yet he therein can feel a virtue left By the sad pressure of a mother's hand, And unto him it still is tremulous With palpitating haste and wet with tears, The key to him of hope and humanness, The coarse shell of life's pearl, Expectancy. This hope hath been to me for love and fame, Hath made me wholly lonely on the earth, Building me up as in a thick-ribbed tower, Wherewith enwalled my watching spirit burned, Conquering its little island from the Dark, Sole as a scholar's lamp, and heard men's steps, In the far hurry of the outward world, Pass dimly forth and back, sounds heard in dream As Ganymede by the eagle was snatched up From the gross sod to be Jove's cupbearer, So was I lifted by my great design: And who hath trod Olympus, from his eye Fades not that broader outlook of the gods; His life's low valleys overbrow earth's clouds, And that Olympian spectre of the past Looms towering up in sovereign memory, Beckoning his soul from meaner heights of doom. Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird, Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me A swift-betraying vision's Ganymede, Yet to have greatly dreamed precludes low ends Great days have ever such a morning-red, On such a base great futures are built up, And aspiration, though not put in act, Comes back to ask its plighted troth again, Still watches round its grave the unlaid ghost Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes, Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak As shadows of bare trees upon the snow, Bound freezing there by the unpitying moon.

While other youths perplexed their mandolins, Praying that Thetis would her fingers twine In the loose glories of her lover's hair, And wile another kiss to keep back day, I, stretched beneath the many-centuried shade Of some writhed oak, the wood's Laocoön, Did of my hope a dryad mistress make, Whom I would woo to meet me privily, Or underneath the stars, or when the moon Flecked all the forest floor with scattered pearls. O days whose memory tames to fawning down The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck!

I know not when this hope enthralled me first, But from my boyhood up I loved to hear The tall-pine-forests of the Apennine Murmur their hoary legends of the sea, Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld; The sudden dark of tropic night shut down O'er the huge whisper of great watery wastes, The while a pair of herons trailingly Flapped inland, where some league-wide river hurled The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred By any but the Northwind's hurrying keels. And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds To my world-seeking heart paid fealty, And catered for it as the Cretan bees Brought honey to the baby Jupiter, Who in his soft hand crushed a violet, God-like foremusing the rough thunder's gripe; Then did I entertain the poet's song, My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell, I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains Whose adamantine links, his manacles, The western main shook growling, and still gnawed. I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne's keel Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore: For I believed the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep, And, listening to the inner flow of things, Speak to the age out of eternity.

Ah me! old hermits sought for solitude In caves and desert places of the earth, Where their own heart-beat was the only stir Of living thing that comforted the year; But the bald pillar-top of Simeon, In midnight's blankest waste, were populous, Matched with the isolation drear and deep Of him who pines among the swarm of men, At once a new thought's king and prisoner, Feeling the truer life within his life, The fountain of his spirit's prophecy, Sinking away and wasting, drop by drop, In the ungrateful sands of sceptic ears. He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods Doth walk a king; for him the pent-up cell Widens beyond the circles of the stars, And all the sceptred spirits of the past Come thronging in to greet him as their peer; But in the market-place's glare and throng He sits apart, an exile, and his brow Aches with the mocking memory of its crown. But to the spirit select there is no choice; He cannot say, This will I do, or that, For the cheap means putting Heaven's ends in pawn, And bartering his bleak rocks, the freehold stern Of destiny's first-born, for smoother fields That yield no crop of self-denying will; A hand is stretched to him from out the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for God. The trial still is the strength's complement, And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child. Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, And disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool Of the world's scorn, are the right mother-milk To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind, And break a pathway to those unknown realms That in the earth's broad shadow lie enthralled; Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts; These are their stay, and when the leaden world Sets its hard face against their fateful thought, And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror, Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale, The inspired soul but flings his patience in, And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe,-- One faith against a whole earth's unbelief, One soul against the flesh of all mankind.

Thus ever seems it when my soul can hear The voice that errs not; then my triumph gleams, O'er the blank ocean beckoning, and all night My heart flies on before me as I sail; Far on I see my lifelong enterprise, Which rose like Ganges mid the freezing snows Of a world's sordidness, sweep broadening down, And, gathering to itself a thousand streams, Grow sacred ere it mingle with the sea; I see the ungated wall of chaos old, With blocks Cyclopean hewn of solid night, Fade like a wreath of unreturning mist Before the irreversible feet of light;-- And lo, with what clear omen in the east On day's gray threshold stands the eager dawn, Like young Leander rosy from the sea Glowing at Hero's lattice!

One day more These muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me. God, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded; Let not this one frail bark, to hollow which I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so Cast up to warp and blacken in the sun, Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle off His cheek-swollen mates, and from the leaning mast Fortune's full sail strains forward! One poor day!-- Remember whose and not how short it is! It is God's day, it is Columbus's. A lavish day! One day, with life and heart, Is more than time enough to find a world.

1844.

AN INCIDENT OF THE FIRE AT HAMBURG.

The tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies, Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries; You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art, They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart.

Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak, Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone, Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone.

It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint, harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines.

Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light; And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells.

Surge leaping after surge, the fire roared onward red as blood, Till half of Hamburg lay engulfed beneath the eddying flood; For miles away, the fiery spray poured down its deadly rain, And back and forth the billows sucked, and paused, and burst again.

From square to square with tiger leaps panted the lustful fire, The air to leeward shuddered with the gasps of its desire; And church and palace, which even now stood whelmed but to the knee, Lift their black roofs like breakers lone amid the whirling sea.

Up in his tower old Herman sat and watched with quiet look; His soul had trusted God too long to be at last forsook; He could not fear, for surely God a pathway would unfold Through this red sea for faithful hearts, as once he did of old.

But scarcely can he cross himself, or on his good saint call, Before the sacrilegious flood o'erleaped the churchyard wall; And, ere a _pater_ half was said, mid smoke and crackling glare, His island tower scarce juts its head above the wide despair.

Upon the peril's desperate peak his heart stood up sublime; His first thought was for God above, his next was for his chime; "Sing now and make your voices heard in hymns of praise," cried he, "As did the Israelites of old, safe walking through the sea!

"Through this red sea our God hath made the pathway safe to shore; Our promised land stands full in sight; shout now as ne'er before!" And as the tower came crushing down, the bells, in clear accord, Pealed forth the grand old German hymn,--"All good souls, praise the Lord!"

THE SOWER.

I saw a Sower walking slow Across the earth, from east to west; His hair was white as mountain snow, His head drooped forward on his breast.

With shrivelled hands he flung his seed, Nor ever turned to look behind; Of sight or sound he took no heed; It seemed he was both deaf and blind.

His dim face showed no soul beneath, Yet in my heart I felt a stir, As if I looked upon the sheath That once had clasped Excalibur.

I heard, as still the seed he cast, How, crooning to himself, he sung,-- "I sow again the holy Past, The happy days when I was young.

"Then all was wheat without a tare, Then all was righteous, fair, and true; And I am he whose thoughtful care Shall plant the Old World in the New.

"The fruitful germs I scatter free, With busy hand, while all men sleep; In Europe now, from sea to sea, The nations bless me as they reap."

Then I looked back along his path, And heard the clash of steel on steel, Where man faced man, in deadly wrath, While clanged the tocsin's hurrying peal.

The sky with burning towns flared red, Nearer the noise of fighting rolled, And brothers' blood, by brothers shed, Crept, curdling, over pavements cold.

Then marked I how each germ of truth Which through the dotard's fingers ran Was mated with a dragon's tooth Whence there sprang up an armed man.

I shouted, but he could not hear; Made signs, but these he could not see; And still, without a doubt or fear, Broadcast he scattered anarchy.

Long to my straining ears the blast Brought faintly back the words he sung:-- "I sow again the holy Past, The happy days when I was young."

HUNGER AND COLD.

Sisters two, all praise to you, With your faces pinched and blue; To the poor man you've been true From of old: You can speak the keenest word, You are sure of being heard, From the point you're never stirred, Hunger and Cold!

Let sleek statesmen temporize; Palsied are their shifts and lies When they meet your bloodshot eyes, Grim and bold; Policy you set at naught, In their traps you'll not be caught, You're too honest to be bought, Hunger and Cold!

Bolt and bar the palace-door; While the mass of men are poor, Naked truth grows more and more Uncontrolled; You had never yet, I guess, Any praise for bashfulness, You can visit sans court-dress, Hunger and Cold!

While the music fell and rose, And the dance reeled to its close, Where her round of costly woes Fashion strolled, I beheld with shuddering fear Wolves' eyes through the windows peer; Little dream they you are near, Hunger and Cold!

When the toiler's heart you clutch, Conscience is not valued much, He recks not a bloody smutch On his gold: Everything to you defers, You are potent reasoners, At your whisper Treason stirs, Hunger and Cold!

Rude comparisons you draw, Words refuse to sate your maw, Your gaunt limbs the cobweb law Cannot hold: You 're not clogged with foolish pride, But can seize a right denied; Somehow God is on your side, Hunger and Cold!

You respect no hoary wrong More for having triumphed long; Its past victims, haggard throng, From the mould You unbury: swords and spears Weaker are than poor men's tears, Weaker than your silent years, Hunger and Cold!

Let them guard both hall and bower; Through the window you will glower, Patient till your reckoning hour Shall be tolled: Cheeks are pale, but hands are red, Guiltless blood may chance be shed, But ye must and will be fed, Hunger and Cold!

God has plans man must not spoil, Some were made to starve and toil, Some to share the wine and oil, We are told: Devil's theories are these, Stifling hope and love and peace, Framed your hideous lusts to please, Hunger and Cold!

Scatter ashes on thy head, Tears of burning sorrow shed, Earth! and be by pity led To Love's fold; Ere they block the very door With lean corpses of the poor, And will hush for naught but gore,-- Hunger and Cold!

1844.

THE LANDLORD.

What boot your houses and your lands? In spite of close-drawn deed and fence, Like water, 'twixt your cheated hands, They slip into the graveyard's sands And mock your ownership's pretence.

How shall you speak to urge your right, Choked with that soil for which you lust The bit of clay, for whose delight You grasp, is mortgaged, too; Death might Foreclose this very day in dust.

Fence as you please, this plain poor man, Whose only fields are in his wit, Who shapes the world, as best he can, According to God's higher plan, Owns you and fences as is fit.

Though yours the rents, his incomes wax By right of eminent domain; From factory tall to woodman's axe, All things on earth must pay their tax, To feed his hungry heart and brain.

He takes you from your easy-chair, And what he plans, that you must do. You sleep in down, eat dainty fare,-- He mounts his crazy garret-stair And starves, the landlord over you.

Feeding the clods your idlesse drains, You make more green six feet of soil; His fruitful word, like suns and rains, Partakes the seasons' bounteous pains, And toils to lighten human toil.

Your lands, with force or cunning got, Shrink to the measure of the grave; But Death himself abridges not The tenures of almighty thought, The titles of the wise and brave.

TO A PINE-TREE.

Far up on Katahdin thou towerest, Purple-blue with the distance and vast; Like a cloud o'er the lowlands thou lowerest, That hangs poised on a lull in the blast, To its fall leaning awful.

In the storm, like a prophet o'ermaddened, Thou singest and tossest thy branches; Thy heart with the terror is gladdened, Thou forebodest the dread avalanches, When whole mountains swoop valeward.

In the calm thou o'erstretchest the valleys With thine arms, as if blessings imploring, Like an old king led forth from his palace, When his people to battle are pouring From the city beneath him.

To the lumberer asleep 'neath thy glooming Thou dost sing of wild billows in motion, Till he longs to be swung mid their booming In the tents of the Arabs of ocean, Whose finned isles are their cattle.

For the gale snatches thee for his lyre, With mad hand crashing melody frantic, While he pours forth his mighty desire To leap down on the eager Atlantic, Whose arms stretch to his playmate.

The wild storm makes his lair in thy branches, Preying thence on the continent under; Like a lion, crouched close on his haunches, There awaiteth his leap the fierce thunder, Growling low with impatience.

Spite of winter, thou keep'st thy green glory, Lusty father of Titans past number! The snow-flakes alone make thee hoary, Nestling close to thy branches in slumber, And thee mantling with silence.

Thou alone know'st the splendor of winter, Mid thy snow-silvered, hushed precipices, Hearing crags of green ice groan and splinter, And then plunge down the muffled abysses In the quiet of midnight.

Thou alone know'st the glory of summer, Gazing down on thy broad seas of forest, On thy subjects that send a proud murmur Up to thee, to their sachem, who towerest From thy bleak throne to heaven.

SI DESCENDERO IN INFERNUM, ADES.

O, wandering dim on the extremest edge Of God's bright providence, whose spirits sigh Drearily in you, like the winter sedge That shivers o'er the dead pool stiff and dry, A thin, sad voice, when the bold wind roars by From the clear North of Duty,-- Still by cracked arch and broken shaft I trace That here was once a shrine and holy place Of the supernal Beauty,-- A child's play-altar reared of stones and moss, With wilted flowers for offering laid across, Mute recognition of the all-ruling Grace.

How far are ye from the innocent, from those Whose hearts are as a little lane serene, Smooth-heaped from wall to wall with unbroke snows, Or in the summer blithe with lamb-cropped green, Save the one track, where naught more rude is seen Than the plump wain at even Bringing home four months' sunshine bound in sheaves!-- How far are ye from those! yet who believes That ye can shut out heaven? Your souls partake its influence, not in vain Nor all unconscious, as that silent lane Its drift of noiseless apple-blooms receives.

Looking within myself, I note how thin A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate, Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;-- In my own heart I find the worst man's mate, And see not dimly the smooth-hingèd gate That opes to those abysses Where ye grope darkly,--ye who never knew On your young hearts love's consecrating dew, Or felt a mother's kisses, Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled. Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world The fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue!

One band ye cannot break,--the force that clips And grasps your circles to the central light; Yours is the prodigal comet's long ellipse, Self-exiled to the farthest verge of night; Yet strives with you no less that inward might No sin hath e'er imbruted; The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes; The Law brooks not to have its solitudes By bigot feet polluted;-- Yet they who watch your god-compelled return May see your happy perihelion burn Where the calm sun his unfledged planets broods.

TO THE PAST.

Wondrous and awful are thy silent halls, O kingdom of the past! There lie the bygone ages in their palls, Guarded by shadows vast,-- There all is hushed and breathless, Save when some image of old error falls Earth worshipped once as deathless.

There sits drear Egypt, mid beleaguering sands, Half woman and half beast, The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands That once lit all the East; A dotard bleared and hoary, There Asser crouches o'er the blackened brands Of Asia's long-quenched glory.

Still as a city buried 'neath the sea, Thy courts and temples stand; Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry Of saints and heroes grand, Thy phantasms grope and shiver, Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently Into Time's gnawing river.

Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun, Of their old godhead lorn, Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun, Which they misdeem for morn; And yet the eternal sorrow In their unmonarched eyes says day is done Without the hope of morrow.

O realm of silence and of swart eclipse, The shapes that haunt thy gloom Make signs to us and move their withered lips Across the gulf of doom; Yet all their sound and motion Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of ships On the mirage's ocean.

And if sometimes a moaning wandereth From out thy desolate halls, If some grim shadow of thy living death Across our sunshine falls And scares the world to error, The eternal life sends forth melodious breath To chase the misty terror.

Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deeds Are silent now in dust, Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds Beneath some sudden gust; Thy forms and creeds have vanished, Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds From the world's garden banished.

Whatever of true life there was in thee Leaps in our age's veins; Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery, And shake thine idle chains;-- To thee thy dross is clinging, For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see, Thy poets still are singing.

Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care, Float the green Fortunate Isles, Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share Our martyrdoms and toils; The present moves attended With all of brave and excellent and fair That made the old time splendid.

TO THE FUTURE.

O Land of Promise! from what Pisgah's height Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers, Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight, Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers? Gazing upon the sunset's high-heaped gold, Its crags of opal and of chrysolite, Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold Still brightening abysses, And blazing precipices, Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven, Sometimes a glimpse is given Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted blisses.

O Land of Quiet! to thy shore the surf Of the perturbèd Present rolls and sleeps; Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turf And lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps, As to a mother's, the o'erwearied heart, Hearing far off and dim the toiling mart, The hurrying feet, the curses without number, And, circled with the glow Elysian, Of thine exulting vision, Out of its very cares wooes charms for peace and slumber.

To thee the Earth lifts up her fettered hands And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile Thou blessest her, and she forgets her bands, And her old woe-worn face a little while Grows young and noble; unto thee the Oppressor Looks, and is dumb with awe; The eternal law, Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser, Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding, And he can see the grim-eyed Doom From out the trembling gloom Its silent-footed steeds toward his palace goading.

What promises hast thou for Poets' eyes, Aweary of the turmoil and the wrong! To all their hopes what overjoyed replies! What undreamed ecstasies for blissful song! Thy happy plains no war-trump's brawling clangor Disturbs, and fools the poor to hate the poor; The humble glares not on the high with anger; Love leaves no grudge at less, no greed for more; In vain strives Self the god-like sense to smother; From the soul's deeps It throbs and leaps; The noble 'neath foul rags beholds his long-lost brother.

To thee the Martyr looketh, and his fires Unlock their fangs and leave his spirit free; To thee the Poet mid his toil aspires, And grief and hunger climb about his knee, Welcome as children; thou upholdest The lone Inventor by his demon haunted; The Prophet cries to thee when hearts are coldest, And, gazing o'er the midnight's bleak abyss, Sees the drowsed soul awaken at thy kiss, And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted.

Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly The guilty thinks it pity; taught by thee, Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith blindly Their own souls they were scarring; conquerors see With horror in their hands the accursed spear That tore the meek One's side on Calvary, And from their trophies shrink with ghastly fear; Thou, too, art the Forgiver, The beauty of man's soul to man revealing; The arrows from thy quiver Pierce Error's guilty heart, but only pierce for healing.

O, whither, whither, glory-wingèd dreams, From out Life's sweat and turmoil would ye bear me? Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams,-- This agony of hopeless contrast spare me! Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night! He is a coward, who would borrow A charm against the present sorrow From the vague Future's promise of delight: As life's alarums nearer roll, The ancestral buckler calls, Self-clanging from the walls In the high temple of the soul; Where are most sorrows, there the poet's sphere is, To feed the soul with patience, To heal its desolations With words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies.

HEBE.

I saw the twinkle of white feet, I saw the flash of robes descending; Before her ran an influence fleet, That bowed my heart like barley bending.

As, in bare fields, the searching bees Pilot to blooms beyond our finding, It led me on, by sweet degrees, Joy's simple honey-cells unbinding.

Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates; With nearer love the sky leaned o'er me; The long-sought Secret's golden gates On musical hinges swung before me.

I saw the brimmed bowl in her grasp Thrilling with godhood; like a lover I sprang the proffered life to clasp;-- The beaker fell; the luck was over.

The Earth has drunk the vintage up; What boots it patch the goblet's splinters? Can Summer fill the icy cup, Whose treacherous crystal is but Winter's?

O spendthrift, haste! await the Gods; Their nectar crowns the lips of Patience; Haste scatters on unthankful sods The immortal gift in vain libations.

Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, And shuns the hands would seize upon her, Follow thy life, and she will sue To pour for thee the cup of honor.

THE SEARCH.

I went to seek for Christ, And Nature seemed so fair That first the woods and fields my youth enticed, And I was sure to find him there: The temple I forsook, And to the solitude Allegiance paid; but winter came and shook The crown and purple from my wood; His snows, like desert sands, with scornful drift, Besieged the columned aisle and palace-gate; My Thebes, cut deep with many a solemn rift, But epitaphed her own sepulchred state: Then I remembered whom I went to seek, And blessed blunt Winter for his counsel bleak.

Back to the world I turned, For Christ, I said, is king; So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned, As far beneath his sojourning: Mid power and wealth I sought, But found no trace of him, And all the costly offerings I had brought With sudden rust and mould grew dim: I found his tomb, indeed, where, by their laws, All must on stated days themselves imprison, Mocking with bread a dead creed's grinning jaws, Witless how long the life had thence arisen; Due sacrifice to this they set apart, Prizing it more than Christ's own living heart.

So from my feet the dust Of the proud World I shook; Then came dear Love and shared with me his crust, And half my sorrow's burden took. After the World's soft bed, Its rich and dainty fare, Like down seemed Love's coarse pillow to my head, His cheap food seemed as manna rare; Fresh-trodden prints of bare and bleeding feet, Turned to the heedless city whence I came, Hard by I saw, and springs of worship sweet Gushed from my cleft heart smitten by the same; Love looked me in the face and spake no words, But straight I knew those foot-prints were the Lord's.

I followed where they led And in a hovel rude, With naught to fence the weather from his head, The King I sought for meekly stood A naked, hungry child Clung round his gracious knee, And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled To bless the smile that set him free; New miracles I saw his presence do,-- No more I knew the hovel bare and poor, The gathered chips into a woodpile grew, The broken morsel swelled to goodly store; I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek, His throne is with the outcast and the weak.

THE PRESENT CRISIS.

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west, And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe, When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro; At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start, Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart, And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.

So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill, Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill, And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod, Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flush of right or wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;-- In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-- Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate, But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din, List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,-- "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."

Slavery, the earthborn Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;-- Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,--they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track, Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand _Credo_ which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.

'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves, Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;-- Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make Plymouth rock sublime?

They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

_December, 1845._

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE.

What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

No more the landscape holds its wealth apart. Making me poorer in my poverty, But mingles with my senses and my heart; My own projected spirit seems to me In her own reverie the world to steep; 'Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep, Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill, and tree.

How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms, Each into each, the hazy distances! The softened season all the landscape charms; Those hills, my native village that embay, In waves of dreamier purple roll away, And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves; The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by, So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.

The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne, Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits; Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails; Silently overhead the henhawk sails, With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.

The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The squirrel on the shingly shagbark's bough, Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound, Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.

O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn 's here, and Winter soon will be Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

The birch, most shy and lady-like of trees, Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.

He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, Who, mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt, With distant eye broods over other sights, Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace, The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace, And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost, And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, After the first betrayal of the frost, Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky; The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold, To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring eye.

The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush; The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush; All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days, Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines, and weeds, and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.

Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary, Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's foot, Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye, Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot, The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires. Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires; In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.

Below, the Charles--a stripe of nether sky, Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, Then spreading out at his next turn beyond, A silver circle like an inland pond-- Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.

Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight Who cannot in their various incomes share, From every season drawn, of shade and light, Who sees in them but levels brown and bare; Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free On them its largesse of variety, For nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.

In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green, O'er which the light winds run with glimmering feet; Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen, There, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet; And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd, As if the silent shadow of a cloud Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.

All round, upon the river's slippery edge, Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge; Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run Of dimpling light, and with the current seem to glide.

In Summer 'tis a blithesome sight to see, As, step by step, with measured swing, they pass, The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee, Their sharp scythes panting through the thick-set grass; Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring, Their nooning take, while one begins to sing A stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky of brass.

Meanwhile the devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops, A decorous bird of business, who provides For his brown mate and fledglings six besides, And looks from right to left, a farmer mid his crops.

Another change subdues them in the Fall, But saddens not; they still show merrier tints, Though sober russet seems to cover all; When the first sunshine through their dew-drops glints, Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across, Redeems with rarer hues the season's loss, As Dawn's feet there had touched and left their rosy prints.

Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest, Lean o'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill, While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west, Glow opposite;--the marshes drink their fill And swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade Through pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade, Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simond's darkening hill.

Later, and yet ere Winter wholly shuts, Ere through the first dry snow the runner grates, And the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts, While firmer ice the eager boy awaits, Trying each buckle and strap beside the fire, And until bed-time plays with his desire, Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates;--

Then, every morn, the river's banks shine bright With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail, By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night, 'Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail, Giving a pretty emblem of the day When guiltier arms in light shall melt away, And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war's cramping mail.

And now those waterfalls the ebbing river Twice every day creates on either side Tinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they shiver In grass-arched channels to the sun denied; High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow, The silvered flats gleam frostily below, Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the glassy tide.

But, crowned in turn by vying seasons three, Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; This glory seems to rest immovably,-- The others were too fleet and vanishing; When the hid tide is at its highest flow, O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything.

The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, As pale as formal candles lit by day; Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind; The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play, Show pearly breakers combing o'er their lee, White crests as of some just enchanted sea, Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway.

But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant, From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, And the roused Charles remembers in his veins Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost, That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns.

Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, With leaden pools between or gullies bare, The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice; No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, Or when the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there.

But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes; The early evening with her misty dyes Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, And tones the landscape down, and soothes the wearied eyes.

There gleams my native village, dear to me, Though higher change's waves each day are seen, Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, Sanding with houses the diminished green; There, in red brick, which softening time defies, Stand square and stiff the Muses' factories;-- How with my life knit up is every well-known scene!

Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow To outward sight, and through your marshes wind; Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago, Your twin flows silent through my world of mind: Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray! Before my inner sight ye stretch away, And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.

Beyond that hillock's house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise, Where dust and mud the equal year divide, There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died, Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.

_Virgilium vidi tantum_,--I have seen But as a boy, who looks alike on all, That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;-- Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame That thither many times the Painter came;-- One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.

Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow,-- Our only sure possession is the past; The village blacksmith died a month ago, And dim to me the forge's roaring blast; Soon fire-new mediævals we shall see Oust the black smithy from its chestnut tree, And that hewn down, perhaps, the beehive green and vast.

How many times, prouder than king on throne, Loosed from the village school-dame's A's and B's, Panting have I the creaky bellows blown, And watched the pent volcano's red increase, Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down By that hard arm voluminous and brown, From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.

Dear native town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,--to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day, And when the westering sun half-sunken burns, The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away,

So palpable, I've seen those unshorn few, The six old willows at the causey's end, (Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew,) Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send, Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn thread, Where streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red, Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird's flashes blend.

Yes, dearer far thy dust than all that e'er, Beneath the awarded crown of victory, Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer; Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three, Yet _collegisse juvat_, I am glad That here what colleging was mine I had,-- It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!

Nearer art thou than simply native earth, My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie; A closer claim thy soil may well put forth, Something of kindred more than sympathy; For in thy bounds I reverently laid away That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,

That portion of my life more choice to me (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole) Than all the imperfect residue can be;-- The Artist saw his statue of the soul Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke, The earthen model into fragments broke, And without her the impoverished seasons roll.

THE GROWTH OF THE LEGEND.

A FRAGMENT.

A legend that grew in the forest's hush Slowly as tear-drops gather and gush, When a word some poet chanced to say Ages ago, in his careless way, Brings our youth back to us out of its shroud Clearly as under yon thunder-cloud I see that white sea-gull. It grew and grew, From the pine-trees gathering a sombre hue, Till it seems a mere murmur out of the vast Norwegian forests of the past; And it grew itself like a true Northern pine, First a little slender line, Like a mermaid's green eyelash, and then anon A stem that a tower might rest upon, Standing spear-straight in the waist-deep moss, Its bony roots clutching around and across, As if they would tear up earth's heart in their grasp Ere the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp; Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine, To shrunk snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine, Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor, Hearing waves moan again on the perilous shore Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow groped its way 'Twixt the frothy gnashed tusks of some ship-crunching bay.

So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall, As the Gipsy child grows that eats crusts in the hall; It sucked the whole strength of the earth and the sky, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, all brought it supply; 'Twas a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there, A true part of the landscape as sea, land, and air; For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was To force up these wild births of the woods under glass, And so, if 'tis told as it should be told, Though 't were sung under Venice's moonlight of gold, You would hear the old voice of its mother, the pine, Murmur sea-like and northern through every line, And the verses should hang, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody, Like the lithe sun-steeped limbs of the parent tree.

Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food For their grim roots is left when the thousand-yeared wood-- The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing From Michael's white shoulder--is hewn and defaced By iconoclast axes in desperate waste, And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long, Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song? Then the legends go with them,--even yet on the sea A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree, And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the core With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.

Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never let in, Since the day of creation, the light and the din Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed From the midnight primeval its armful of shade, And has kept the weird Past with its sagas alive Mid the hum and the stir of To-day's busy hive, There the legend takes root in the age-gathered gloom, And its murmurous boughs for their tossing find room.

Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goes Groping down to the sea 'neath his mountainous snows; Where the lake's frore Sahara of never-tracked white, When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost, As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost; Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires which throw Their own threatening shadows far round o'er the snow, When the wolf howls aloof, and the wavering glare Flashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear, When the wood's huge recesses, half-lighted, supply A canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try, Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not down Through the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town, But skulk in the depths of the measureless wood Mid the Dark's creeping whispers that curdle the blood, When the eye, glanced in dread o'er the shoulder, may dream, Ere it shrinks to the camp-fire's companioning gleam, That it saw the fierce ghost of the Red Man crouch back To the shroud of the tree-trunk's invincible black;-- There the old shapes crowd thick round the pine-shadowed camp, Which shun the keen gleam of the scholarly lamp, And the seed of the legend finds true Norland ground, While the border-tale's told and the canteen flits round.

A CONTRAST.

Thy love thou sentest oft to me, And still as oft I thrust it back; Thy messengers I could not see In those who everything did lack,-- The poor, the outcast, and the black.

Pride held his hand before mine eyes, The world with flattery stuffed mine ears; I looked to see a monarch's guise, Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years, Poor, naked, fettered, full of tears.

Yet, when I sent my love to thee, Thou with a smile didst take it in, And entertain'dst it royally, Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin, And leprous with the taint of sin.

Now every day thy love I meet, As o'er the earth it wanders wide, With weary step and bleeding feet, Still knocking at the heart of pride And offering grace, though still denied.

EXTREME UNCTION.

Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be Alone with the consoler, Death; Far sadder eyes than thine will see This crumbling clay yield up its breath; These shrivelled hands have deeper stains Than holy oil can cleanse away,-- Hands that have plucked the world's coarse gains As erst they plucked the flowers of May.

Call, if thou canst, to these gray eyes Some faith from youth's traditions wrung; This fruitless husk which dustward dries Has been a heart once, has been young; On this bowed head the awful Past Once laid its consecrating hands; The Future in its purpose vast Paused, waiting my supreme commands.

But look! whose shadows block the door? Who are those two that stand aloof? See! on my hands this freshening gore Writes o'er again its crimson proof! My looked-for death-bed guests are met;-- There my dead Youth doth wring its hands, And there, with eyes that goad me yet, The ghost of my Ideal stands!

God bends from out the deep and says,-- "I gave thee the great gift of life; Wast thou not called in many ways? Are not my earth and heaven at strife? I gave thee of my seed to sow, Bringest thou me my hundred-fold?" Can I look up with face aglow, And answer, "Father, here is gold?"

I have been innocent; God knows When first this wasted life began, Not grape with grape more kindly grows, Than I with every brother-man: Now here I gasp; what lose my kind, When this fast-ebbing breath shall part? What bands of love and service bind This being to the world's sad heart?

Christ still was wandering o'er the earth, Without a place to lay his head; He found free welcome at my hearth, He shared my cup and broke my bread: Now, when I hear those steps sublime, That bring the other world to this, My snake-turned nature, sunk in slime, Starts sideway with defiant hiss.

Upon the hour when I was born, God said, "Another man shall be," And the great Maker did not scorn Out of himself to fashion me; He sunned me with his ripening looks, And Heaven's rich instincts in me grew, As effortless as woodland nooks Send violets up and paint them blue.

Yes, I who now, with angry tears, Am exiled back to brutish clod, Have borne unquenched for fourscore years A spark of the eternal God; And to what end? How yield I back The trust for such high uses given? Heaven's light hath but revealed a track Whereby to crawl away from heaven.

Men think it is an awful sight To see a soul just set adrift On that drear voyage from whose night The ominous shadows never lift; But 'tis more awful to behold A helpless infant, newly born, Whose little hands unconscious hold The keys of darkness and of morn.

Mine held them once; I flung away Those keys that might have open set The golden sluices of the day, But clutch the keys of darkness yet;-- I hear the reapers singing go Into God's harvest; I, that might With them have chosen, here below Grope shuddering at the gates of night.

O glorious Youth, that once wast mine! O high ideal! all in vain Ye enter at this ruined shrine Whence worship ne'er shall rise again, The bat and owl inhabit here, The snake nests in the altar-stone, The sacred vessels moulder near, The image of the God is gone.

THE OAK.

What gnarlèd stretch, what depth of shade, is his! There needs no crown to mark the forest's king; How in his leaves outshines full summer's bliss! Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring, Which he with such benignant royalty Accepts, as overpayeth what is lent; All nature seems his vassal proud to be, And cunning only for his ornament.

How towers he, too, amid the billowed snows, An unquelled exile from the summer's throne, Whose plain, uncinctured front more kingly shows, Now that the obscuring courtier leaves are flown. His boughs make music of the winter air, Jewelled with sleet, like some cathedral front Where clinging snow-flakes with quaint art repair The dints and furrows of time's envious brunt.

How doth his patient strength the rude March wind Persuade to seem glad breaths of summer breeze, And win the soil that fain would be unkind, To swell his revenues with proud increase! He is the gem; and all the landscape wide (So doth his grandeur isolate the sense) Seems but the setting, worthless all beside, An empty socket, were he fallen thence.

So, from off converse with life's wintry gales, Should man learn how to clasp with tougher roots The inspiring earth;--how otherwise avails The leaf-creating sap that sunward shoots? So every year that falls with noiseless flake Should fill old scars upon the stormward side, And make hoar age revered for age's sake, Not for traditions of youth's leafy pride.

So from the pinched soil of a churlish fate, True hearts compel the sap of sturdier growth, So between earth and heaven stand simply great, That these shall seem but their attendants both; For nature's forces with obedient zeal Wait on the rooted faith and oaken will; As quickly the pretender's cheat they feel, And turn mad Pucks to flout and mock him still.

Lord! all thy works are lessons,--each contains Some emblem of man's all-containing soul; Shall he make fruitless all thy glorious pains, Delving within thy grace an eyeless mole? Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove, Cause me some message of thy truth to bring, Speak but a word through me, nor let thy love Among my boughs disdain to perch and sing.

AMBROSE.

Never, surely, was holier man Than Ambrose, since the world began; With diet spare and raiment thin, He shielded himself from the father of sin; With bed of iron and scourgings oft, His heart to God's hand as wax made soft.

Through earnest prayer and watchings long He sought to know 'twixt right and wrong, Much wrestling with the blessed Word To make it yield the sense of the Lord, That he might build a storm-proof creed To fold the flock in at their need.

At last he builded a perfect faith, Fenced round about with _The Lord thus saith_; To himself he fitted the doorway's size, Meted the light to the need of his eyes, And knew, by a sure and inward sign, That the work of his fingers was divine.

Then Ambrose said, "All those shall die The eternal death who believe not as I;" And some were boiled, some burned in fire, Some sawn in twain, that his heart's desire, For the good of men's souls, might be satisfied, By the drawing of all to the righteous side.

One day, as Ambrose was seeking the truth In his lonely walk, he saw a youth Resting himself in the shade of a tree; It had never been given him to see So shining a face, and the good man thought 'T were pity he should not believe as he ought.

So he set himself by the young man's side, And the state of his soul with questions tried; But the heart of the stranger was hardened indeed Nor received the stamp of the one true creed, And the spirit of Ambrose waxed sore to find Such face the porch of so narrow a mind.

"As each beholds in cloud and fire The shape that answers his own desire, So each," said the youth, "in the Law shall find The figure and features of his mind; And to each in his mercy hath God allowed His several pillar of fire and cloud."

The soul of Ambrose burned with zeal And holy wrath for the young man's weal: "Believest thou then, most wretched youth," Cried he, "a dividual essence in Truth? I fear me thy heart is too cramped with sin To take the Lord in his glory in."

Now there bubbled beside them where they stood, A fountain of waters sweet and good; The youth to the streamlet's brink drew near Saying, "Ambrose, thou maker of creeds, look here!" Six vases of crystal then he took, And set them along the edge of the brook.

"As into these vessels the water I pour, There shall one hold less, another more, And the water unchanged, in every case, Shall put on the figure of the vase; O thou, who wouldst unity make through strife, Canst thou fit this sign to the Water of Life?"

When Ambrose looked up, he stood alone, The youth and the stream and the vases were gone; But he knew, by a sense of humbled grace, He had talked with an angel face to face, And felt his heart change inwardly, As he fell on his knees beneath the tree.

ABOVE AND BELOW.