Nor all unconscious, as that silent lane Its drift of noiseless apple-blooms receives.

Looking within myself. I note how thin A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate,

Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;

In my own heart I find the worst man's mate,

And see not dimly the smooth-hinged gate

That opes to those abysses Where ye grope darkly, — ye who never knew

On your young hearts love's consecrating dew,

Or felt a mother's kisses, Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled;

Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world

The fatal nightshade grows and bitter

The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes;

The Law brooks not to have its solitudes
By bigot feet polluted; -
Yet they who watch your God-com-
pelled return

May see your happy perihelion burn Where the calm sun his unfledged planets broods.

TO THE PAST.

WONDROUS and awful are thy silent halls,

O kingdom of the past! There lie the bygone ages in their palls, Guarded by shadows vast, There all is hushed and breathless, Save when some image of old error falls Earth worshipped once as deathless.

There sits drear Egypt, 'mid beleaguering sands,

Half woman and half beast, The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands

That once lit all the East; A dotard bleared and hoary, There Asser crouches o'er the blackened brands

Of Asia's long-quenched glory.

Still as a city buried 'neath the sea

Thy courts and temples stand; Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry Of saints and heroes grand, Thy phantasms grope and shiver, Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently

Into Time's gnawing river.

Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun,
Of their old godhead lorn,
Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun,
Which they misdeem for morn;
And yet the eternal sorrow
In their unmonarched eyes says day is
done

Without the hope of morrow.

O realm of silence and of swart eclipse, The shapes that haunt thy gloom

Make signs to us and move thy with ered lips

Across the gulf of doom;

Yet all their sound and motion Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of ships

On the mirage's ocean.

And if sometimes a moaning wandereth
From out thy desolate halls,
If some grim shadow of thy living death
Across thy sunshine falls

And scares the world to error, The eternal life sends forth melodious breath

To chase the misty terror.

Thy mighty clamors, wars, and worldnoised deeds

Are silent now in dust, Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds

Beneath some sudden gust;

Thy forms and creeds have vanist.ed, Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds

From the world's garden banished. Whatever of true life there was in thee Leaps in our age's veins;

Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery,

And shake thine idle chains; To thee thy dross is clinging, For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see Thy poets still are singing.

Here, 'mid the bleak waves of our strife and care,

Float the green Fortunate Isles Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share

Our martyrdoms and toils; The present moves attended With all of brave and excellent and fair That made the old time splendid.

TO THE FUTURE.

O LAND of Promise! from what Pis gah's height

Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers.

Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight, Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers?

Gazing upon the sunset's high-heaped gold,

its crags of opal and of chrysolite,

Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold

Still brightening abysses, And blazing precipices, Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven,

Sometimes a glimpse is given Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted blisses.

O Land of Quiet! to thy shore the surf Of the perturbed Present rolls and sleeps ;

Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turf

And lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps,

As to a mother's, the o'erwearied heart, Hearing far off and dim the toiling mart,

The hurrying feet, the curses without number,

And, circled with the glow Elysian Of thine exulting vision, Out of its very cares woos charms for peace and slumber.

To thee the earth lifts up her fettered hands

And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile

Thou blessest her, and she forgets her bands,

And her old woe-worn face a little while

Grows young and noble; unto thee the
Oppressor

Looks, and is dumb with awe;
The eternal law,

Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser,

Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding,

And he can see the grim-eyed
Doom

From out the trembling gloom Its silent-footed steeds towards his palace goading.

What promises hast thou for Poets' eyes,

Aweary of the turmoil and the wrong! To all their hopes what overjoyed replies !

What undreamed ecstasies for blissful song!

Thy happy plains no war-trump's brawling clangor

Disturbs, and fools the poor to hate the poor;

The humble glares not on the high with anger;

Love leaves no grudge at less, no greed for more;

In vain strives Self the godlike sense to smother;

From the soul's deeps It throbs and leaps; The noble 'neath foul rags beholds his long-lost brother.

So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned,

As far beneath his sojourning: '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,

And half my sorrow's burden took. After the World's soft bed, Its rich and dainty fare, Like down seemed Love's coarse pillow to my head,

His cheap food seemed as manna

rare;

Fresh-trodden prints of bare and bleeding feet,

Turned to the heedless city whence I came,

Hard by I saw, and springs of worship

sweet

Gushed from my cleft heart smitten by the same;

Love looked me in the face and spake

no words,

But straight I knew those footprints were the Lord's.

I followed where they led
And in a hovel rude,

With naught to fence the weather from his head,

The King I sought for meekly stood;
A naked, hungry child

Clung round his gracious knee, And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled

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 manchild 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 flash of right or wrong;