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, 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, Each man is some man's servant; every soul 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. Or all the myriad moods of mind The thing we long for, that we are Still, through our paltry stir and strife, Helps make the soul immortal. Longing is God's fresh heavenward will But, would we learn that heart's full scope Our lives must climb from hope to hope Ah! let us hope that to our praise The moments when we tread his ways, But when the spirit beckons, |