this world The fatal nightshade grows and bitter rue! One band ye cannot break, - the force that clips And grasps your circles to the central light; Yours is the prodigal comet's long ellipse, Self-exiled to the farthest verge of night; Yet strives with you no less that inward might No sin hath e'er imbruted; The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes; The Law brooks not to have its solitudes By bigot feet polluted ; Yet they who watch your God-compelled return May see your happy perihelion burn Where the calm sun his unfledged planets broods. TO THE PAST. WONDROUS and awful are thy silent halls, O kingdom of the past! There lie the bygone ages in their palls, Guarded by shadows vast; There all is hushed and breathless, Save when some image of old error falls Earth worshipped once as deathless. There sits drear Egypt, mid beleaguering sands, Half woman and half beast, The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands That once lit all the East; A dotard bleared and hoary, There Asser crouches o'er the blackened brands Of Asia's long-quenched glory. Still as a city buried 'neath the sea Thy courts and temples stand; Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry Of saints and heroes grand, Thy phantasms grope and shiver, Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently Into Time's gnawing river. Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun, Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun, done Without the hope of morrow. O realm of silence and of swart eclipse, The shapes that haunt thy gloom Make signs to us and move their withered lips Across the gulf of doom; Yet all their sound and motion Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of ships On the mirage's ocean. And if sometimes a moaning wandereth From out thy desolate halls, If some grim shadow of thy living death Across our sunshine falls And scares the world to error, The eternal life sends forth melodious breath To chase the misty terror. Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world noised deeds Are silent now in dust, And lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps, As to a mother's, the o'erwearied heart, Gone like a tremble of the huddling Hearing far off and dim the toiling reeds Beneath some sudden gust; Thy forms and creeds have vanished, Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds From the world's garden banished. Whatever of true life there was in thee Leaps in our age's veins; mart, The hurrying feet, the curses without And, circled with the glow Elysian Out of its very cares wooes charms for peace and slumber. Wield still thy bent and wrinkled em- To thee the earth lifts up her fettered pery, And shake thine idle chains; To thee thy dross is clinging, hands And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see, Thou blessest her, and she forgets her Thy poets still are singing. bands, And her old woe-worn face a little while Grows young and noble; unto thee the Looks, and is dumb with awe; 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. O LAND of Promise! from what Pisgah's What promises hast thou for Poets' height Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers, Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight, Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers? Gazing upon the sunset's high-heaped Thy happy plains no war-trump's brawl Back to the world I turned, So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned, As far beneath his sojourning: Mid power and wealth I sought, And all the costly offerings I had brought I followed where they led, naught to fence the weather from his head, The King I sought for meekly stood; A naked, hungry child Clung round his gracious knee, a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled store; I knelt and wept my Christ no more With sudden rust and mould grew His throne is with the outcast and the dim : I found his tomb, indeed, where, by their laws, All must on stated days themselves imprison, Mocking with bread a dead creed's grinning jaws, Witless how long the life had thence arisen ; Due sacrifice to this they set apart, Prizing it more than Christ's own living heart. So from my feet the dust Of the proud World I shook; Then came dear Love and shared with me his crust, And half my sorrow's burden took. After the World's soft bed, Its rich and dainty fare, Like down seemed Love's coarse pillow to my head, His cheap food seemed as manna rare; Fresh-trodden prints of bare and bleeding feet, Turned to the heedless city whence I came, weak. THE PRESENT CRISIS. 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, Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart, And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart. |