not I; Westward still points the inexorable soul:

Here am I, with no friend but the sad

sea,

The beating heart of this great enterprise,

Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death;

This have I mused on, since mine eye could first

Among the stars distinguish and with joy

Rest on that God-fed Pharos of the north,

On some blue promontory of heaven lighted

That juts far out into the upper sea;
To this one hope my heart hath clung for

years,

As would a foundling to the talisman Hung round his neck by hands he knew not whose;

A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside,
Yet he therein can feel a virtue left
By the sad pressure of a mother's hand,
And unto him it still is tremulous
With palpitating haste and wet with
tears,

The key to him of hope and humanness, The coarse shell of life's pearl, Expectancy.

This hope hath been to me for love and fame,

Hath made me wholly lonely on the earth,

Building me up as in a thick-ribbed

clouds,

And that Olympian spectre of the past Looms towering up in sovereign memory, Beckoning his soul from meaner heights of doom.

Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird,

Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me A swift-betraying vision's Ganymede, Yet to have greatly dreamed precludes low ends;

Great days have ever such a morning-red, On such a base great futures are built up, And aspiration, though not put in act, Comes back to ask its plighted troth again,

Still watches round its grave the unlaid ghost

Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes, Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak

As shadows of bare trees upon the snow, Bound freezing there by the unpitying

river hurled

The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred

By any but the North-wind's hurrying keels.

And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds

To my world-seeking heart paid fealty,
And catered for it as the Cretan bees
Brought honey to the baby Jupiter,
Who in his soft hand crushed a violet,
Godlike foremusing the rough thunder's
gripe;

Then did I entertain the poet's song,
My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er
That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell,
I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains
Whose adamantine links, his manacles,
The western main shook growling, and
still gnawed.

I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale
Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne's
keel

Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore:

For I believed the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep, And, listening to the inner flow of things, Speak to the age out of eternity.

Ah me! old hermits sought for solitude In caves and desert places of the earth, Where their own heart-beat was the only stir

Of living thing that comforted the year; But the bald pillar-top of Simeon,

In midnight's blankest waste, were populous,

Matched with the isolation drear and deep

Of him who pines among the swarm of

throng

He sits apart, an exile, and his brow Aches with the mocking memory of its

crown.

But to the spirit select there is no choice; He cannot say, This will I do, or that, For the cheap means putting Heaven's ends in pawn,

And bartering his bleak rocks, the freehold stern

Of destiny's first-born, for smoother fields That yield no crop of self-denying will; A hand is stretched to him from out the dark,

Which grasping without question, he is led

Where there is work that he must do for God.

The trial still is the strength's complement,

And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child. Chances have laws as fixed as planets have,

And disappointment's dry and bitter root,

Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool

Of

the world's scorn, are the right

mother-milk

To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind,

And break a pathway to those unknown realms

That in the earth's broad shadow lie enthralled;

Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts;

These are their stay, and when the leaden world

Sets its hard face against their fateful thought,

And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror,

Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale,

The inspired soul but flings his patience in,

And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe,

One faith against a whole earth's unbelief,

One soul against the flesh of all mankind.

umph gleams,

streams,

Grow sacred ere it mingle with the sea;
I see the ungated wall of chaos old,
With blocks Cyclopean hewn of solid
night,

Fade like a wreath of unreturning mist
Before the irreversible feet of light;
And lo, with what clear omen in the east
On day's gray threshold stands the eager
dawn,

Like young Leander rosy from the sea
Glowing at Hero's lattice!

One day more These muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me :

God, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded;

Let not this one frail bark, to hollow which

I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so Cast up to warp and blacken in the sun, Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle

off

His cheek-swollen pack, and from the leaning mast

Fortune's full sail strains forward!

a work of human art,

They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart.

Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak,

Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone,

Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone.

It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough,

A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough;

The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines.

Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right

To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light;

And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells

Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells.

Surge leaping after surge, the fire roared

onward red as blood,

Till half of Hamburg lay engulfed beFor miles away the fiery spray poured neath the eddying flood; And back and forth the billows sucked, down its deadly rain,

and paused, and burst again.

From square to square with tiger leaps panted the lustful fire,

The air to leeward shuddered with the gasps of its desire;

And church and palace, which even now stood whelmed but to the knee, Lift their black roofs like breakers lone

amid the whirling sea.

Up in his tower old Herman sat and watched with quiet look;

His soul had trusted God too long to be at last forsook ;

He could not fear, for surely God a pathway would unfold

Through this red sea for faithful hearts, as once he did of old.