For good, not gravitating earthward yet,

But circling in diviner periods,
Are sent into the world,-no little thing,
When this unbounded possibility
Into the outer silence is withdrawn.
Ah, in this world, where every guiding
thread

Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death,

The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim !

How changed, dear friend, are thy part and thy child's!

He bends above thy cradle now, or holds

His warning finger out to be thy guide; Thou art the nursling now; he watches

EURYDICE.

HEAVEN'S Cup held down to me I drain, The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain;

Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye
I suck the last drop of the sky;
With each hot sense I draw to the lees
The quickening out-door influences,
And empty to each radiant comer
A supernaculum of summer:
Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juice
Could bring enchantment so profuse,
Though for its press each grape-bunch
had

The white feet of an Oread.

Through our coarse art gleam, now and then,

The features of angelic men:
'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint
Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint;
The dauber's botch no more obscures
The mighty master's portraitures.
And who can say what luckier beam
The hidden glory shall redeem,

For what chance clod the soil may wait

To stumble on its nobler fate,
Or why, to his unwarned abode,
Still by surprises comes the God?
Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross,
May meditate a whole youth's loss,
Some windfall joy, we know not whence,
Redeem a lifetime's rash expense,
And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark,
Stripped of their simulated dark,
Mountains of gold that pierce the sky,
Girdling its valleyed poverty.

Prayer breathed in vain! no wish's

sway

Rebuilds the vanished yesterday;
For plated wares of Sheffield stamp
We gave the old Aladdin's lamp;
'Tis we are changed: ah, whither went
That undesigned abandonment,
That wise, unquestioning content,
Which could erect its microcosm
Out of a weed's neglected blossom,
Could call up Arthur and his peers
By a low moss's clump of spears,
Or, in its shingle trireme launched,
Where Charles in some green inlet
branched,

Could venture for the golden fleece
And dragon-watched Hesperides,
Or, from its ripple-shattered fate,
Ulysses' chances re-create?

When, heralding life's every phase,
There glowed a goddess-veiling haze,
A plenteous, forewarning grace,
Like that more tender dawn that flies
Before the full moon's ample rise?
Methinks thy parting glory shines
Through yonder grove of singing pines;
At that eĺm-vista's end I trace
Dimly thy sad leave-taking face,
Eurydice! Eurydice !

The tremulous leaves repeat to me
Eurydice! Eurydice !

No gloomier Orcus swallows thee
Than the unclouded sunset's glow;
Thine is at least Elysian woe;
Thou hast Good's natural decay,
And fadest like a star away
Into an atmosphere whose shine
With fuller day o'ermasters thine,
Entering defeat as 't were a shrine;
For us, we turn life's diary o'er
To find but one word, - Nevermore.
1845.

I only know she came and went.

As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps

The orchards full of bloom and scent, So clove her May my wintry sleeps ;I only know she came and went.

An angel stood and met my gaze,

Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went.

O, 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 eye-
lids,

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 But loosed the hampering strings, And when they had opened her cagedoor,

My little bird used her wings.

But they left in her stead a changeling,
A little angel child,

That seems like her bud in full blossom,
And smiles as she never smiled:
When I wake in the morning, I see it
Where she always used to lie,
And I feel as weak as a violet
Alone 'neath the awful sky.

As weak, yet as trustful also;
For the whole year long I see
All the wonders of faithful Nature
Still worked for the love of me;
Winds wander, and dews drip earth-
ward,

Rain falls, suns rise and set,
Earth whirls, and all but to prosper
A poor little violet.

This child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest,

I cannot lift it up fatherly

And bliss it upon my breast; 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 landmarks everywhere,

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 ştir 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

What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know ;

These have found piteous voice in song and prose;