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 The eternal law, Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser, Its silent-footed steeds toward his palace goading. What promises hast thou for Poets' eyes, 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, Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith blindly That tore the meek One's side on Calvary, The beauty of man's soul to man revealing; 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: The ancestral buckler calls, In the high temple of the soul; Where are most sorrows, there the poet's sphere is, To heal its desolations With words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies. HEBE. I SAW the twinkle of white feet, As, in bare fields, the searching bees Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates; 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; Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, THE SEARCH. I WENT to seek for Christ, And Nature seemed so fair That first the woods and fields my youth enticed, And to the solitude Allegiance paid; but winter came and shook Back to the world I turned, For Christ, I said, is king; So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned, 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, Its rich and dainty fare, Like down seemed Love's coarse pillow to my head, I followed where they led And in a hovel rude, With naught to fence the weather from his head, Clung round his gracious knee, And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled No more I knew the hovel bare and poor, 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 |