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

Where

That opes to those abysses

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 rue!

One band ye cannot break, - the force that clips

And grasps your circles to the central light;

Yours is the prodigal comet's long ellipse,

Self-exiled to the farthest verge of

Make signs to us and move thy withered 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 vanished, 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
Óppressor

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.