The tent is struck, the vision

stays;

I only know she came and went.

Oh, when the room grows slowly dim,

And life's last oil is nearly spent, One gush of light these eyes will brim,

Only to think she came and went.

THE CHANGELING.

I HAD a little daughter,

And she was given to me To lead me gently backward To the Heavenly Father's knee, That I, by the force of Nature,

Might in some dim wise divine The depth of His infinite patience To this wayward soul of mine.

I know not how others saw her,

But to me she was wholly fair, And the light of the heaven she came from

Still lingered and gleamed in her hair;

For it was as wavy and golden,

And as many changes took, As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples On the yellow bed of a brook.

To what can I liken her smiling Upon me, her kneeling lover, How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids,

And dimpled her wholly over, Till her outstretched hands smiled also,

And I almost seemed to see The very heart of her mother Sending sun through her veins to me!

She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth,

And it hardly seemed a day, When a troop of wandering angels Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari Butloosed the hampering strings, And when they had opened her cage-door,

My little bird used her wings.

What man would watch life's oozy element

Creep Letheward forever, when he might

Down some great river drift beyond men's sight,

To where the undethroned forest's royal tent

Broods with its hush o'er half a continent?

What man with men would push and altercate,

Piecing out crooked means for crooked ends,

When he can have the skies and woods for friends, Snatch back the rudder of his undismantled fate,

And in himself be ruler, church, and state?.

Cast leaves and feathers rot in

last year's nest, Thewingèd brood, flown thence, new dwellings plan; The serf of his own Past is not

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;

Hereman is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and hands,

And to his life is knit with hourly bands.

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 ;-

They did as they were taught; not theirs the blame

If men who scattered firebrands reaped the flame:

They trampled Peace beneath their savage feet,

And by her golden tresses drew Mercy along the pavement of the street.

O Freedom! Freedom! is thy morning-dew

Sogory red? Alas! thy light had ne'er

Shone in upon the chaos of their lair!

They reared to thee such symbol as they knew,

And worshipped it with flame and blood,

A Vengeance, axe in hand, that stood

Holding a tyrant's head up by the clotted hair.

III.

What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know ;

These have found piteous voice in song and prose;

But for the Oppressed, their darkness and their woe,

Their grinding centuries,-what
Muse had those?

Though hall and palace had nor

eyes nor ears,

Hardening a people's heart to senseless stone,

Thou knewest them, O Earth, that

drank their tears,

O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan!

Tney noted down their fetters, link by link;

Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and red the ink;

Rude was their score, as suits unlettered men,

Notched with a headsman's axe upon a block: What marvel if, when came the avenging shock,

"Twas Até, not Urania, held the pen?

IV.

With eye averted, and an anguished frown,

Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife, Where, like the heart of Vengeance, up and down

Throbs in its framework the blood-muffled knife;

Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet

Turn never backward: hers no bloody glare;

Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet,

And where it enters, there is no despair:

Not first on palace and cathedral spire

Quivers and gleams that unconsuming fire;

While these stand black against her morning skies,

The peasant sees it leap from peak to peak

Along his hills; the craftsman's

'Twas close beside him there, Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man.

V.

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

A dynasty plucked out as 'twere 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!

VI.

Not long can he be ruler who allows

His time to run before him; thou wast naught

Soon as the strip of gold about thy brows

Was no more emblem of the People's thought: Vain were thy bayonets against the foe

Thou hadst to cope with; thou

VII.

Is here no triumph? Nay, what though

The yellow blood of Trade meanwhile should pour

Along its arteries a shrunken flow,

And the idle canvas droop around the shore?

These do not make a state,
Nor keep it great;

I think God made
The earth for man, not trade;
And where each humblest human
creature

Can stand, no more suspicious or afraid,

Erect and kingly in his right of nature,

To heaven and earth knit with harmonious ties,

Where I behold the exultation
Of manhood glowing in those eyes
That had been dark for ages,
Or only lit with bestial loves and
rages,

There I behold a Nation :

The France which lies Between the Pyrenees and Rhine

Is the least part of France;

I see her rather in the soul whose shine

Burns through the craftsman's grimy countenance,

In the new energy divine

Of Toil's enfranchised glance.

VIII.

And if it be a dream,-
If the great Future be the little
Past

'Neath a new mask, which drops

and shows at last The same weird, mocking face to balk and blast, Yet, Muse, a gladder measure suits the theme,

And the Tyrtæan harp

Loves notes more resolute and sharp, 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 Labour 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;
""Tis 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!

IX.

Since first I heard our Northwind blow,

Since first I saw Atlantic throw On our fierce rocks his thunder

ous snow,

I loved thee, Freedom; as a boy, The rattle of thy shield at Marathon Did with a Grecian joy Through all my pulses run; But I have learned to love thee now Without the helm upon thy gleaming brow,

A maiden mild and undefiled, Like her who bore the world's redeeming child;

And surely never did thine altars
glance

With purer fires than now in
France;

While, in their bright white
flashes,

Wrong's shadow backward cast Waves cowering o'er the ashes Of the dead, blaspheming Past, O'er the shapes of fallen giants, His own unburied brood,