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30

Sin awakened with a growl.
Ah, poor girl! she had a right
To a blessing from the light;
Title-deeds to sky and earth
God gave to her at her birth;
But, before they were enjoyed,
Poverty had made them void,
And had drunk the sunshine up
From all nature's ample cup,
Leaving her a first-born's share
In the dregs of darkness there.
Often, on the sidewalk bleak,
Hungry, all alone, and weak,
She has seen, in night and storm,
Rooms o'erflow with firelight

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But to have her garment brush
'Gainst the girl whose fingers thin
Wove the weary broidery in,
Bending backward from her toil,
Lest her tears the silk might soil,
And, in midnights chill and murk,
Stitched her life into the work,
Shaping from her bitter thought
Heart's-ease and forget-me-not,
Satirizing her despair

With the emblems woven there.
Little doth the wearer heed
Of the heart-break in the brede; 70
A hyena by her side

Skulks, down-looking,-it is Pride.
He digs for her in the earth,

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In his eyes that stealthy gleam
Was not learned of sky or stream,
But it has the cold, hard glint
Of new dollars from the mint.
Open now your spirit's eyes,
Look through that poor clay dis-
guise

Which has thickened, day by day,
Till it keeps all light at bay,
And his soul in pitchy gloom
Gropes about its narrow tomb, 100
From whose dank and slimy walls
Drop by drop the horror falls.
Look! a serpent lank and cold
Hugs his spirit fold on fold;
From his heart, all day and night,
It doth suck God's blessed light.
Drink it will, and drink it must,
Till the cup holds naught but dust;
All day long he hears it hiss,
Writhing in its fiendish bliss; 110
All night long he sees its eyes
Flicker with foul ecstasies,
As the spirit ebbs away
Into the absorbing clay.
Who is he that skulks, afraid
Of the trust he has betrayed,
Shuddering if perchance a gleam
Of old nobleness should stream
Through the pent, unwholesome

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By more instinct for the best?
'T is a poet who was sent
For a bad world's punishment,
By compelling it to see
Golden glimpses of To Be,
By compelling it to hear
Songs that prove the angels near ;
Who was sent to be the tongue
Of the weak and spirit-wrung, 130
Whence the fiery-winged Despair
In men's shrinking eyes might flare.
'T is our hope doth fashion us
To base use or glorious:

140

He who might have been a lark
Of Truth's morning, from the dark
Raining down melodious hope
Of a freer, broader scope,
Aspirations, prophecies,
Of the spirit's full sunrise,
Chose to be a bird of night,
That, with eyes refusing light,
Hooted from some hollow tree
Of the world's idolatry.
'T is his punishment to hear
Sweep of eager pinions near,
And his own vain wings to feel
Drooping downward to his heel,
All their grace and import lost,
Burdening his weary ghost:
Ever walking by his side
He must see his angel guide,
Who at intervals doth turn
Looks on him so sadly stern,
With such ever-new surprise
Of hushed anguish in her eyes,
That it seems the light of day
From around him shrinks away,
Or drops blunted from the wall
Built around him by his fall.
Then the mountains, whose white
peaks

Catch the morning's

streaks,

150

160

earliest

He must see, where prophets sit, Turning east their faces lit,

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Whence, with footsteps beautiful, It smiles, but never brings you

To the earth, yet dim and dull, They the gladsome tidings bring Of the sunlight's hastening: Never can these hills of bliss

Be o'erclimbed by feet like his !

nearer,

It lights, her nature draws not nigh;

169 'T is but that yours is growing

clearer

20

To her assays; - yes, try and Above our squabbling businesstry, You'll get no deeper than her Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty

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hours,

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One problem still defies thy His first swift word, talaria-shod, Exuberant with conscious God,

art; Thou never canst compute for her Out of the choir of planets blots The distance and diameter

Of any simple human heart.

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The present earth with all its

spots.

80

Himself unshaken as the sky,
His words, like whirlwinds, spin

on high

Systems and creeds pellmell to

gether;

'T is strange as to a deaf man's

eye,

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In some sea-lulled Hesperides, Thou movest through the jarring street,

Secluded from the noise of feet

By her gift-blossom in thy hand, Thy branch of palm from Holy Land;

Yet smile not, worldling, for in No trace is here of ruin's fiery

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Yet there is something round thy Kept sacred for us in the heart of lips friends; That prophesies the coming But these were idle fancies, satisdoom,

The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the eclipse

fied

With the mere husk of this great mystery,

of things.

10

Notches the perfect disk with And dwelling in the outward shows gloom; A something that would banish Heaven is not mounted to on wings

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A banished man in field and The spirit climbs, and hath its

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Nor showed me his mild face: oft With every anguish of our earthly

had I mused

part

Of calm and peace and safe forget- The spirit's sight grows clearer; fulness,

this was meant

Of folded hands, closed eyes, and When Jesus touched the blind

heart at rest,

And slumber sound beneath a

man's lids with clay. Life is the jailer, Death the angel sent

30

Of faults forgotten, and an inner To draw the unwilling bolts and

flowery turf,

place

set us free.

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