ODE.

[Read at the Festival celebrating the birthday of Margaret Fuller OSSOLI, held by the New England Women's Club, Boston, May 23, 1870.]

I.

LIFE'S rearward vistas slowly close behind,

And evermore recede, the glare and shade
Blending in neutral tints far down the glade,
Where youth stepped unconfined,

Or bounded upwards, light and undismayed,
Or struggled through the underbrush and thorns,
Baffled and mad to hear the winding horns,

So far away, triumphant on the heights

Where some found truth, some error's foggy breath,
And some fame's evanescent lights,

Or desolate old age, or crown of early death.

II.

Dim in the distance fade

The sunshine and the shade ;

And many a light that blazed and shone

Into the horizon's mist has gone.

One record rises from our past,

That shall forever last,

A name our age can never

From its remembrance sever.

We bear it in our hearts to-day,

Fresh as the perfume of the May.

It vibrates in the air, a rich, full-chorded strain,
Touched with weird minor moods of pain :

The music of a life known to but few,

Till death gave to the age the fame long due,
And made the unfinished symphony a part
Of the great growing century's mind and heart.

And wondered, then but slowly, faintly praised
The exuberant soul that dared to flash and soar
Beyond the petty bounds

Of their trim garden grounds, —
She with wise intuition raised

Her image of ideal womanhood,

The incarnate True and Fair and Good,
Set in a light but seldom seen before.
While, with the early watchers in the dawn
Of intellectual faith, her hopeful eyes,
Patiently waiting, from the crowd withdrawn,
She saw a newer morning rise,

And flame from cloud to cloud, and climb
Across the dreary tracts of time.

The garnered wisdom of the past she drew
Into her life, as flowers the sun and dew;
Yet valued all her varied lore

But as the avenue and door
That opened to the Primal Beam,
And sense of Truth supreme.

And so, beyond her earlier bounds she grew;
All the quaint essences from study gained,

Fused in a human fellowship anew,

While that too conscious life, in early years o'erstrained, Of long, deep, lonely introversion born,

Distilled like dews of morn,

And dropped on high and low the blessing it contained.
Her glowing pen through many a thoughtful page,
Discoursed in subtle questions of the age,

Or glanced in lighter mood at themes less grave,
The brilliant glitter of a summer wave.

Her sweet persuasive voice we still can hear,
Ruling her charméd circle like a queen;

While wit and fancy sparkled ever clear

Her graver moods between.

The

pure perennial heat

Of youth's ideal love forever glowed

Through all her thoughts and words, and overflowed

The listeners round her seat.

While those around her but half understood

How wise she was, how good,

How nobly self-denying, as she tasked

Heart, mind, and strength for truth, nor nobler office asked.

V.

Nor honor less, nor praise

To her whose later days

Were pledged to lift wronged Justice to her seat;

And though Rome's new-lit torch

Blew backwards, but to scorch

The hand that held it, dropping at her feet,
Quenched in the patriot's blood, not incomplete
Her task, though all the heroic strains she sang
To chronicle a struggling nation's pang,

The records of the strife

That agonized its life,

Were strewn upon the wind like withered flowers,
And gulfed in roaring floods, Italia's loss and ours!

Alas! how could we with our lamp of hope

Read thy perplexed and darkened horoscope!

How could we know, when Destiny's great loom
Thy life's most precious threads inwove
With all love's rich embroidery of love,

That its bright tissue held the shade
Of death across the golden braid,
The inevitable woof of death and tragic doom!
When ties were sweetest, dearest;
When love, when hope were nearest;
When eyes grew bright to greet thee;
When arms were stretched to meet thee;
When all thy life was flowering

As in a garden home,
The storm beyond was lowering,
The end of all was come !

I seem to hear

The grand sweet music of that earnest life,
Grander and sweeter in its later strife,

Stop, suddenly drowned amid the tempest drear;

I hear the harp whose strings,

Whose delicate thoughtful strings should well have played Some hopeful melody of woods and springs;

Had Fate accorded with love's passionate prayer,
Had she lived on with us, with us grown old,
Through war, through peace, through present toil and care,
Through future progress; could she now behold
The triumph of the land,

Standing where now we stand;

The nation saved from brute Rebellion's strife,
And pledged to live a newer, healthier life;
Had she but seen our wider range,

The splendor of our coming lights,

Her vision and her strength grown with her change
From lonely days and nights,

To all that woman needs to make complete

In wifehood and maternal ties

That strange supernal air!

Or art thou sleeping dreamless, knowing naught
Of good or ill, of life or death?

Or art thou but a breeze of Heaven's breath,
A portion of all life, inwrought
In the eternal essence? - All in vain,
Tangled in misty webs of time,

Out on the undiscovered clime
Our clouded eyes we strain;
We cannot pierce the veil.
As the proud eagles fail
Upon their upward track,
And flutter gasping back

From the thin empyrean, so, with wing
Baffled and humbled, we but guess

All we shall gain, by all the soul's distress,

All we shall be, by our poor worthiness.

And so we write and sing

Our dreams of time and space, and call them - Heaven.
We only know that all is for the best;

To God we leave the rest.

So, reverent beneath the mystery
Of Life and Death, wc yield

Back to the great Unknown the spirit given
A few brief years to blossom in our field.
Nor shall time's all-devouring sea
Despoil this brightest century

Of all thou hast been, and shalt ever be.

The age shall guard thy fame,

And reverence thy name.

There is no cloud on them. There is no death for thee!

C. P. Cranch.

SOME MEMORIES OF CHARLES DICKENS.

Na sunny morning in October

ΟΝ

on a pleasant evening in June he died. last the writer of these recollec- The spot is one of the loveliest in Kent, tions heard from the author's lips the and must always be remembered as first chapters of a new story, the con- the last residence of Charles Dickens. cluding lines of which initial pages were He used to declare his firm belief then scarcely dry from the pen. The that Shakespeare was specially fond of story is unfinished, and he who read Kent, and that the poet chose Gad's that autumn morning with such vigor Hill and Rochester for the scenery of of voice and dramatic power is in his his plays from intimate personal knowlgrave. This private reading took place edge of their localities. He said he in the little room where the great nov- had no manner of doubt but that one elist for many years has been accus- of Shakespeare's haunts was the old tomed to write, and in the house where inn at Rochester, and that this convic