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

not I; Westward still points the inexorable soul:

Here am I, with no friend but the sad

sea,

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

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 North-wind'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,
Godlike 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:

I listened, musing, to the prophecy
Of Nero's tutor-victim; lo, the birds
Sing darkling, conscious of the climbing
dawn.

And 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 pop-
ulous,

Matched with the isolation drear and deep

Of him who pines among the swarm of

men,

At once a new thought's king and pris

oner,

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.

Yet 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 the Gaulish

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,
That rose like Ganges mid the freezing

snows

Of a world's solitude, 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

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 And back and forth the billows sucked, down its deadly rain,

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 held 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 armëd 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!