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 beleaguer ing 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 formis 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;
In their unmonarched eyes says day is
And yet the eternal sorrow

done

Thy mighty clamors, wars, and worldnoised 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;

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.

pery,

And shake thine idle chains;

To thee thy dross is clinging,

hands

And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile

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 towards his palace goading.

What promises hast thou for Poets'

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 perturbed Present rolls and sleeps; Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turf

eyes,

Aweary of the turmoil and the wrong!

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