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Yet it lies in my little one's cradle
And sits in my little one's chair,

And the light of the heaven she's gone to
Transfigures its golden hair.

THE PIONEER.

WHAT man would live coffined with brick and stone, Imprisoned from the influences of air,

And cramped with selfish land-marks everywhere, When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone, The unmapped prairie none can fence or own?

What man would read and read the selfsame faces, And, like the marbles which the windmill grinds, Rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds, This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull traces, When there are woods and un-man-stifled places?

What man o'er one old thought would pore and pore, Shut like a book between its covers thin

For every fool to leave his dog's-ears in,
When solitude is his, and God for evermore,
Just for the opening of a paltry door?

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 undethronèd 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,
The winged brood, flown thence, new dwellings plan;
The serf of his own Past is not a man;

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 scope
Which we are hourly wronging,

Our lives must climb from hope to hope
And realize our longing.

Ah! let us hope that to our praise
Good God not only reckons

The moments when we tread his ways,
But when the spirit beckons,

That some slight good is also wrought
Beyond self-satisfaction,

When we are simply good in thought,
Howe'er we fail in action.

ODE TO FRANCE.

FEBRUARY, 1848.

I.

As, flake by flake, the beetling avalanches

Build up their imminent crags of noiseless snow, Till some chance thrill the loosened ruin launches And the blind havoc leaps unwarned below, So grew and gathered through the silent years. The madness of a People, wrong by wrong. There seemed no strength in the dumb toiler's tears, No strength in suffering;- but the Past was strong: The brute despair of trampled centuries

Leaped up with one hoarse yell and snapped its bands, Groped for its right with horny, callous hands, And stared around for God with bloodshot eyes. What wonder if those palms were all too hard For nice distinctions, if that mænad throngThey whose thick atmosphere no bard Had shivered with the lightning of his song, Brutes with the memories and desires of men, Whose chronicles were writ with iron pen,

In the crooked shoulder and the forehead low

Set wrong to balance wrong,

And physicked woe with woe ?

II.

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
So gory 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 knowest them, O Earth, that drank their tears, O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan! They 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 headman's axe upon a block: What marvel if, when came the avenging shock, "T was Ate, 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 burning eyes
Own with cool tears its influence mother-meek;
It lights the poet's heart up like a star;-
Ah! while the tyrant deemed it still afar,
And twined with golden threads his futile snare,
That swift, convicting glow all round him ran;
"T was 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 '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!

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 didst wage

War not with Frenchmen merely;

- no,

Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age, The invisible Spirit whose first breath divine Scattered thy frail endeavor,

And, like poor last year's leaves, whirled thee and thine Into the Dark forever!

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