Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari
But loosed the hampering strings,
And when they had opened her cage-door,
My little bird used her wings.

But they left in her stead a changeling,
A little angel child,

That seems like her bud in full blossom,
And smiles as she never smiled:
When I wake in the morning, I see it
Where she always used to lie,
And I feel as weak as a violet
Alone 'neath the awful sky.

As weak, yet as trustful also;
For the whole year long I see
All the wonders of faithful Nature
Still worked for the love of me;
Winds wander, and dews drip earthward,
Rain falls, suns rise and set,

Earth whirls, and all but to prosper
A poor little violet.

This child is not mine as the first was,

I cannot sing it to rest,

I cannot lift it up fatherly

And bliss it upon my breast;

Yet it lies in my little one's cradle

And sits in my little one's chair,

And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair.

THE PIONEER.

WHAT man would live coffined with brick and stone,

Imprisoned from the influences of air,

And cramped with selfish land-marks everywhere,

When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone, The unmapped prairie none can fence or own?

What man would read and read the selfsame faces,

And, like the marbles which the windmill

grinds,

Rub smooth forever with the same smooth

minds,

This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull

traces,

451

When there are woods and un-man-stifled

places ?

What man o'er one old thought would pore and

pore,

Shut like a book between its covers thin

For every fool to leave his dog's-ears in, When solitude is his, and God for evermore, Just for the opening of a paltry door?

What man would watch life's oozy element Creep Letheward forever, when he might Down some great river drift beyond men's

sight,

To where the undethroned forest's royal tent
Broods with its hush o'er half a continent?

What man with men would push and altercate, Piecing out crooked means for crooked ends, When he can have the skies and woods for

friends,

Snatch back the rudder of his undismantled fate, And in himself be ruler, church, and state?

Cast leaves and feathers rot in last year's nest, The winged brood, flown thence, new dwellings plan;

The serf of his own Past is not a man

To change and change is life, to move and never rest;

Not what we are, but what we hope, is best.

The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind;

Cities rob men of eyes and hands and feet,
Patching one whole of many incomplete;
The general preys upon the individual mind,
And each alone is helpless as the wind.

Each man is some man's servant; every soul
Is by some other's presence quite discrowned;
Each owes the next through all the imperfect
round,

Yet not with mutual help; each man is his own goal,

And the whole earth must stop to pay his toll.

Here, life the undiminished man demands;

New faculties stretch out to meet new wants;

What Nature asks, that Nature also grants; Here man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and

hands,

And to his life is knit with hourly bands.

Come out, then, from the old thoughts and old

ways,

Before you harden to a crystal cold

Which the new life can shatter, but not mould;

Freedom for you still waits, still, looking backward,

stays,

But widens still the irretrievable space.

LONGING.

Of all the myriad moods of mind
That through the soul come thronging,
Which one was e'er so dear, so kind,
So beautiful as Longing?

The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment,
Before the Present poor and bare
Can make its sneering comment.

Still, through our paltry stir and strife,
Glows down the wished Ideal,
And Longing moulds in clay what Life
Carves in the marble Real;

To let the new life in, we know,
Desire must ope the portal
Perhaps the longing to be so

Helps make the soul immortal.

Longing is God's fresh heavenward will
With our poor earthward striving;
We quench it that we may be still
Content with merely living;

But, would we learn that heart's full scope
Which we are hourly wronging,

Our lives must climb from hope to hope
And realize our longing.

Ah! let us hope that to our praise

Good God not only reckons

The moments when we tread his ways,

But when the spirit beckons,