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;

Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame ;In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals

shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 't is Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the

beacon-moments see,

That, like peaks of some sunk contitinent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry

Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly:

Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by. Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness

'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keep

ing watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,

Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,

Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his 'miserable prey;—

Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,

And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,

they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,

Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,

By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track,

Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand Cred which in prophet-hearts hath

burned

Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven up turned.

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter

sea,

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key. December, 1845.

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE.

WHAT Visionary tints the year puts

on,

When falling leaves falter through motionless air

Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!

How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,

As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills

The bowl between me and those distant hills,

And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

No more the landscape holds its wealth apart,

Making me poorer in my poverty, But mingles with my senses and my heart;

My own projected spirit seems to me In her own reverie the world to steep;

'Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep,

Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree.

How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,

Clasped by the faint horizon's languid

arms,

Each into each, the hazy distances ! The softened season all the landscape charms;

Those hills, my native village that embay,

In waves of dreamier purple roll

away,

And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

Says Autumn 's here, and Winter soon will be,

Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees,

Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,

And hints at her foregone gentilities

With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves;

The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on,

Glares red as blood across the sinking sun,

As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.

He looks a sachem, in red blanket

wrapt,

Who, 'mid some council of the sadgarbed whites,

Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt,

With distant eye broods over other sights,

Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace,

The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace,

And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost,

And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry,

After the first betrayal of the frost, Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky; The chestnuts, lavish of their longhid gold,

To the faint Summer, beggared now and old,

Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring eye.

The ash her purple drops forgiv

ingly

And sadly, breaking not the general hush;

The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea,

Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush;