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,
Of their old godhead lorn,

Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun,
Which they misdeem for morn;
And yet the eternal sorrow
In their unmonarched eyes says day is

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,

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
number,

And, circled with the glow Elysian
Of thine exulting vision,

Out of its very cares wooes charms for peace and slumber.

pery,

And shake thine idle chains;

To thee thy dross is clinging,

hands

And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile

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.

height

Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful

bowers,

Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight, Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined

towers?

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

So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned,

As far beneath his sojourning:

Mid power and wealth I sought,
But found no trace of him,

And all the costly offerings I had brought

I followed where they led,
And in a hovel rude,

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;

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.