Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith blindly see With horror in their hands the accursed spear 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 wearics. IIEBE. I saw the twinkle of white feet, 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; Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, And shuns the hands would seize upon To Follow thy life, and she will sue pour for thee the cup of honor. her; THE SEARCII. 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. |