Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly
The guilty thinks it pity; taught by thee,

Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith blindly

Their own souls they were scarring; conquerors

see

With horror in their hands the accursed spear

That tore the meek One's side on Calvary, And from their trophies shrink with ghastly fear; Thou, too, art the Forgiver,

The beauty of man's soul to man revealing;

The arrows from thy quiver

Pierce error's guilty heart, but only pierce for healing.

O, whither, whither, glory-winged 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:

As life's alarums nearer roll,

The ancestral buckler calls,

Self-clanging, from the walls

In the high temple of the soul;

Where are most sorrows, there the poet's sphere is, To feed the soul with patience,

To heal its desolations

With words of unshorn truth, with love that never

wearies.

HEBE.

I SAW the twinkle of white 1eet,

I saw the flash of robes descending;

Before her ran an influence fleet,
That bowed my heart like barley bending.

As, in bare fields, the searching bees Pilot to blooms beyond our finding,

It led me on, by sweet degrees Joy's simple honey-cells unbinding.

Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates;

With nearer love the sky leaned o'er me;

The long-sought Secret's golden gates

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; Their nectar crowns the lips of Patience; Haste scatters on unthankful sods

The immortal gift in vain libations.

Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, And shuns the hands would seize upon her;

Follow thy life, and she will sue

To pour

for thee the cup of honor.

4

THE SEARCH.

I WENT to seek for Christ,

And Nature seemed so fair

That first the woods and fields my youth enticed, And I was sure to find him there :

The temple I forsook,

And to the solitude

Allegiance paid; but Winter came and shook

The crown and purple from my wood; His snows, like desert sands, with scornful drift, Besieged the columned aisle and palace-gate; My Thebes, cut deep with many a solemn rift, But epitaphed her own sepulchred state : Then I remembered whom I went to seek,

And blessed blunt Winter for his council bleak.