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

What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know ;

These have found piteous voice in song and prose;

O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom's fruit?

A dynasty plucked out as 't were a weed

Grown rankly in a night, that leaves no seed !

Could eighteen years strike down no deeper root?

But now thy vulture eye was turned on Spain,

A shout from Paris, and thy crown falls off,

Thy race has ceased to reign,

And thou become a fugitive and scoff: Slippery the feet that mount by stairs of gold,

And weakest of all fences one of steel;

Go and keep school again like him of old,

The Syracusan tyrant; - thou mayst feel

Royal amid a birch-swayed commonweal !

Throbbing. as throbs the bosom, hot and fast:

Such visions are of morning, Theirs is no vague forewarning, The dreams which nations dream come true,

And shape the world anew;
If this be a sleep,

Make it long, make it deep, O Father, who sendest the harvests men reap!

While Labor so sleepeth
His sorrow is gone,
No longer he weepeth,
But smileth and steepeth

His thoughts in the dawn;
He heareth Hope yonder

Rain, lark-like, her fancies,
His dreaming hands wander

'Mid heart's-ease and pansies;
""T is a dream! 'Tis a vision !"
Shrieks Mammon aghast ;
"The day's broad derision
Will chase it at last;
Ye are mad, ye have taken
A slumbering kraken

For firm land of the Past!"
Ah! if he awaken,

God shield us all then,
If this dream rudely shaken
Shall cheat him again!

Is there, say you, nothing higher? Naught, God save us! that transcends

Laws of cotton texture, wove by vulgar men for vulgar ends?

Did Jehovah ask their counsel, or submit to them a plan,

Ere he filled with loves, hopes, longings, this aspiring heart of man? For their edict does the soul wait, ere it swing round to the pole

Of the true, the free, the God-willed, all that makes it be a soul?

Law is holy; but not your law, ye who keep the tablets whole

While ye dash the Law to pieces, shatter it in life and soul;

Bearing up the Ark is lightsome, golden Apis hid within,

While we Levites share the offerings, richer by the people's sin.

Give to Cæsar what is Cæsar's? yes, but tell me, if you can,

Is this superscription Cæsar's here upon our brother man?

Is not here some other's image, dark and sullied though it be, In this fellow-soul that worships, struggles Godward even as we?

It was not to such a future that the Mayflower's prow was turned; Not to such a faith the martyrs clung, exulting as they burned; Not by such laws are men fashioned, earnest, simple, valiant, great In the household virtues whereon rests the unconquerable state.

Ah! there is a higher gospel, overhead the God-roof springs,

And each glad, obedient planet like a golden shuttle sings

Through the web which Time is weaving in his never-resting loom, Weaving seasons many-colored, bring ing prophecy to doom.