Hark! that rustle of a dress, Stiff with lavish costliness!

Writhing in its fiendish bliss; All night long he sees its eyes

flush

But to have her garment brush
'Gainst the girl whose fingers thin
Wove the weary broidery in,
Bending backward from her toil,
Lest her tears the silk might soil,
And, in midnights chill and murk,
Stitched her life into the work,
Shaping from her bitter thought
Heart's-ease and forget-me-not,
Satirizing her despair

With the emblems woven there.
Little doth the wearer heed
Of the heart-break in the brede;
A hyena by her side
Skulks, down-looking, — it is Pride.
He digs for her in the earth,
Where lie all her claims of birth,
With his foul paws rooting o'er
Some long-buried ancestor,
Who, perhaps, a statue won
By the ill deeds he had done,
By the innocent blood he shed,
By the desolation spread
Over happy villages,
Blotting out the smile of peace.

There walks Judas, he who sold
Yesterday his Lord for gold,
Sold God's presence in his heart
For a proud step in the mart;
He hath dealt in flesh and blood;
At the bank his name is good;
At the bank, and only there,
"T is a marketable ware.
In his eyes that stealthy gleam
Was not learned of sky or stream,
But it has the cold, hard glint
Of new dollars from the mint.
Open now your spirit's eyes,
Look through that poor clay disguise
Which has thickened, day by day,
Till it keeps all light at bay,
And his soul in pitchy gloom
Gropes about its narrow tomb,
From whose dank and slimy walls
Drop by drop the horror falls.
Look! a serpent lank and cold
Hugs his spirit fold on fold;
From his heart, all day and night,
It doth suck God's blessed light.
Drink it will, and drink it must,
Till the cup holds naught but dust;
All day long he hears it hiss,

As the spirit ebbs away Into the absorbing clay.

Who is he that skulks, afraid
Of the trust he has betrayed,
Shuddering if perchance a gleam
Of old nobleness should stream
Through the pent, unwholesome room,
Where his shrunk soul cowers in

gloom,

Spirit sad beyond the rest
By more instinct for the best?
T is a poet who was sent
For a bad world's punishment,
By compelling it to see
Golden glimpses of To Be,
By compelling it to hear
Songs that prove the angels near;
Who was sent to be the tongue
Of the weak and spirit-wrung,
Whence the fiery-winged Despair
In men's shrinking eyes might flare.
'T is our hope doth fashion us
To base use or glorious:

He who might have been a lark
Of Truth's morning, from the dark
Raining down melodious hope
Of a freer, broader scope,
Aspirations, prophecies,
Of the spirit's full sunrise,
Chose to be a bird of night,
That, with eyes refusing light,
Hooted from some hollow tree
Of the world's idolatry.
'Tis his punishment to hear
Sweep of eager pinions near,
And his own vain wings to feel
Drooping downward to his heel,
All their grace and import lost,
Burdening his weary ghost:
Ever walking by his side
He must see his angel guide,
Who at intervals doth turn
Looks on him so sadly stern,
With such ever-new surprise
Of hushed anguish in her eyes,
That it seems the light of day
From around him shrinks away,
Or drops blunted from the wall
Built around him by his fall.

Then the mountains, whose white peaks
Catch the morning's earliest streaks,
He must see, where prophets sit,
Turning east their faces lit,

Whence, with footsteps beautiful,
To the earth, yet dim and dull,
They the gladsome tidings bring
Of the sunlight's hastening:
Never can these hills of bliss
Be o'erclimbed by feet like his!

But enough! O, do not dare
From the next the veil to tear,
Woven of station, trade, or dress,
More obscene than nakedness,
Wherewith plausible culture drapes
Fallen Nature's myriad shapes !
Let us rather love to mark
How the unextinguished spark
Still gleams through the thin disguise
Of our customs, pomps, and lies,
And, not seldom blown to flame,
Vindicate its ancient claim.

you;

It merely puts you to the proof

And sorts what qualities are in you; It smiles, but never brings you nearer, It lights, her nature draws not nigh; "T is but that yours is growing clearer

To her assays; - yes, try and try,
You'll get no deeper than her eye.

There, you are classified: she's gone
Far, far away into herself;
Each with its Latin label on,
Your poor components, one by one,

Are laid upon their proper shelf
In her compact and ordered mind,
And what of you is left behind

Is no more to her than the wind;

In that clear brain, which, day and night,

No movement of the heart e'er jostles, Her friends are ranged on left and right,

Here, silex, hornblende, sienite;

There, animal remains and fossils.

And yet, O subtile analyst,

That canst each property detect Of mood or grain, that canst untwist Each tangled skein of intellect, And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare Each mental nerve more fine than air, O brain exact, that in thy scales Canst weigh the sun and never err,

For once thy patient science fails, One problem still defies thy art; — Thou never canst compute for her The distance and diameter

Of any simple human heart.

II.

HEAR him but speak, and you will feel The shadows of the Portico

Over your tranquil spirit steal,

To modulate all joy and woe

To one subdued, subduing glow; Above our squabbling business-hours, Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty lowers, His nature satirizes ours;

A form and front of Attic grace,

He shames the higgling market-place, And dwarfs our more mechanic powers.

What throbbing verse can fitly render That face so pure, so trembling-tender?

Sensation glimmers through its rest, It speaks unmanacled by words,

As full of motion as a nest That palpitates with unfledged birds; "T is likest to Bethesda's stream, Forewarned through all its thrilling springs,

White with the angel's coming gleam, And rippled with his fanning wings.

Hear him unfold his plots and plans,
And larger destinies seem man's;
You conjure from his glowing face
The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans
The gulf wherein so many fall,
'Twixt possible and actual;
His first swift word, talaria-shod,
Exuberant with conscious God,

loss.

The bee hums on; around the blossomed vine

Whirs the light humming-bird; the cricket chirps;

The locust's shrill alarum stings the

ear;

Hard by, the cock shouts lustily; from farm to farin,

His cheery brothers, telling of the sun, Answer, till far away the joyance dies: We never knew before how God had filled

The summer air with happy living sounds;

All round us seems an overplus of life, And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still.

It is most strange, when the great miracle

Hath for our sakes been done, when we have had

Our inwardest experience of God, When with his presence still the room expands,

And is awed after him, that naught is changed,

That Nature's face looks unacknowledging,

And the mad world still dances heedless

on

After its butterflies, and gives no sign.
T is hard at first to see it all aright:
In vain Faith blows her trump to sum-
mon back

Her scattered troop: yet, through the clouded glass

Of our own bitter tears, we learn to look Undazzled on the kindness of God's face;

Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines through.

It is no little thing, when a fresh soul And a fresh heart, with their unmeas ured scope

For good, not gravitating earthward yet,
But circling in diviner periods,
Are sent into the world, -no little
thing,

When this unbounded possibility
Into the outer silence is withdrawn.
Ah, in this world, where every guiding
thread

Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death,

How changed, dear friend, are thy part

and thy child's!

He bends above thy cradle now, or holds His warning finger out to be thy guide; Thou art the nursling now; he watches thee

Slow learning, one by one, the secret things

Which are to him used sights of every day;

He smiles to see thy wondering glances

con

The grass and pebbles of the spiritworld,

To thee miraculous; and he will teach Thy knees their due observances of

prayer.

Children are God's apostles, day by day Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace;

Nor hath thy babe his mission left undone.

To me, at least, his going hence hath given

Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies, And opened a new fountain in my heart For thee, my friend, and all: and O, if Death

More near approaches meditates, and clasps

Even now some dearer, more reluctant hand,

God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may see

That 't is thine angel, who, with loving haste,

Unto the service of the inner shrine,
Doth waken thy beloved with a kiss.

Through our coarse art gleam, now and then,

The features of angelic men:
'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint
Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint;
The dauber's botch no more obscures
The mighty master's portraitures.
And who can say what luckier beam
The hidden glory shall redeem,
For what chance clod the soul may wait
To stumble on its nobler fate,
Or why, to his unwarned abode,
Still by surprises comes the God?
Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross,
May mediate a whole youth's loss,
Some windfall joy, we know not whence,
Redeem a lifetime's rash expense,
And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark,
Stripped of their simulated dark,
Mountains of gold that pierce the sky,
Girdling its valleyed poverty.

I feel ye, childhood's hopes, return,
With olden heats my pulses burn,
Mine be the self-forgetting sweep,
The torrent impulse swift and wild,
Wherewith Taghkanic's rock born child
Dares gloriously the dangerous leap,
And, in his sky-descended mood,
Transmutes each drop of sluggish blood,
By touch of bravery's simple wand,
To amethyst and diamond,
Proving himself no bastard slip,
But the true granite-cradled one,
Nursed with the rock's primeval drip,
The cloud-embracing mountain's son !

Prayer breathed in vain! no wish's sway
Rebuilds the vanished yesterday;
For plated wares of Sheffield stamp
We gave the old Aladdin's lamp;
'Tis we are changed; ah, whither went
That undesigned abandonment,
That wise, unquestioning content,
Which could erect its microcosm
Out of a weed's neglected blossom,
Could call up Arthur and his peers
By a low moss's clump of spears,
Or, in its shingle trireme launched,
Where Charles in some green inlet
branched,

Could venture for the golden fleece
And dragon-watched Hesperides,
Or, from its ripple-shattered fate,