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 Oppressor

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,
A-weary 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

Oh, whither, whither, glory-winged dreams, From out Life's sweat and turmoil would ye bear me?

Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams, This agony of hopeless contrast spare me! Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night!

He is a coward, who would borrow
A charm against the present sorrow
From the vague Future's promise of de-
light:

As life's alarums nearer roll,
The ancestral buckler calls,
Self-clanging from the walls

In the high temple of the soul; Where are most sorrows, there the poet's sphere is,

To feed the soul with patience,
To heal its desolations

With words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies.

HEBE

I SAW the twinkle of white feet,
I saw the flash of robes descending;
Before her ran an influence fleet,
That bowed my heart like barley bending

As, in bare fields, the searching bees
Pilot to blooms beyond our finding,
It led me on, by sweet degrees
Joy's simple honey-cells unbinding.

Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates;

With nearer love the sky leaned o'er me; The long-sought Secret's golden gates On musical hinges swung before me.

I saw the brimmed bowl in her grasp Thrilling with godhood; like a lover

I sprang the proffered life to clasp; — The beaker fell; the luck was over.

The Earth has drunk the vintage up; What boots it patch the goblet's splinters?

Can Summer fill the icy cup, Whose treacherous crystal is but Winter's ?

O spendthrift haste! await the Gods; The nectar crowns the lips of Patience; Haste scatters on unthankful sods The immortal gift in vain libations.

Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, And shuns the hands would seize upon her; Follow thy life, and she will sue To pour for thee the cup of honor.

THE SEARCH

I WENT to seek for Christ,

And Nature seemed so fair

That first the woods and fields my youth enticed,

And I was sure to find him there:

The temple I forsook,

And to the solitude

Allegiance paid; but winter came and shook

The crown and purple from my wood; His snows, like desert sands, with scornful drift,

Besieged the columned aisle and palacegate;

My Thebes, cut deep with many a solemn

rift,

But epitaphed her own sepulchred state: Then I remembered whom I went to seek, And blessed blunt Winter for his counsel bleak.

Back to the world I turned,
For Christ, I said, is King;

So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned,

I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek, His throne is with the outcast and the weak.

THE PRESENT CRISIS

Dated December, 1844.

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,

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 continent, jut through Oblivion's sea;

Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry

with mute lips apart,

And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.

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, keeping 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,

But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,

List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within, "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,

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 Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For Humanity sweeps onward: where today the martyr stands,

On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;

Far in front the cross stands ready and the

crackling fagots burn,

While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return

To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.

'T is as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves

Of a legendary virtue carved upon our father's graves,

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;

Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? Turn those tracks toward Past or Future,

that make Plymouth Rock sublime ?

They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,

Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's;

But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee

The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires;

Shall

we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away

To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE

The reader familiar with Lowell's life will readily recognize the local references which occur in this poem. To others it may be worth while to point out that the village smithy is the same as that commemorated by Longfellow, that Allston lived in the section of Cambridge known as Cambridgeport, that some of the old willows at the causey's end still stand, and that the group is the one which gave the name to Under the Willows.

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.

Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee

Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves;

The fields seem fields of dream, where
Memory

Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves

Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye

Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by, So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.

The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,

Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates,

Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,

Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits;

Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails;

Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails, With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.

The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer;

The chipmunk, on the shingly shagbark's bough,

Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear,

Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound

Whisks to his winding fastness underground;

The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.

O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows

Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call

Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;

The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and