He flings not ope the ivory gate of Only the fallen spirit knocks at In vain Faith blows her trump to summon back Her scattered troop: yet, through the clouded glass But to benigner regions beckons Of our own bitter tears, we learn to look 60 us, To destinies of more rewarded Undazzled on the kindness of toil. God's face; In the hushed chamber, sitting by Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines through. the dead, It grates on us to hear the flood of sun, It is no little thing, when a fresh soul And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured scope For good, not gravitating earth- Are sent into the world,—no little Into the outer silence is with- Answer, till far away the joyance Ah, in this world, where every dies: guiding thread 70 And is awed after him, that naught Slow learning, one by one, the se. is changed, That Nature's face looks unac knowledging, cret things Which are to him used sights of every day; And the mad world still dances He smiles to see thy wondering heedless on After its butterflies, and gives no sign. 80 glances con The grass and pebbles of the spiritworld, 'Tis hard at first to see it all To thee miraculous; and he will Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies, And opened a new fountain in my heart Through our coarse art gleam, The features of angelic men: Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or The dauber's botch no more ob- The mighty master's portrait ures. And who can say what luckier beam The hidden glory shall redeem, 20 For thee, my friend, and all: and For what chance clod the soul may oh, if Death and clasps 90 wait More near approaches meditates, To stumble on its nobler fate, Or why, to his unwarned abode, Even now some dearer, more re- Still by surprises comes the God? Some moment, nailed on sorrow's luctant hand, God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may see That 't is thine angel, who, with loving haste, Unto the service of the inner shrine, cross, May meditate a whole youth's loss, Some windfall joy, we know not whence, Redeem a lifetime's rash expense, Doth waken thy beloved with a And, suddenly wise, the soul may kiss. EURYDICE HEAVEN'S cup held down to me I drain, The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain; Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye I suck the last drop of the sky; With each hot sense I draw to the lees The quickening out - door influ I feel ye, childhood's hopes, return, With olden heats my pulses burn, Mine be the self-forgetting sweep, The torrent impulse swift and wild, Wherewith Taghkanic's rockborn child Dares gloriously the dangerous leap, And, in his sky-descended mood, Transmutes each drop of sluggish blood, 40 By touch of bravery's simple wand, Though for its press each grape- To amethyst and diamond, bunch had The white feet of an Oread. Proving himself no bastard slip, Nursed with the rock's primeval For us, drip, The cloud-embracing mountain's son! Prayer breathed in vain! no wish's sway Rebuilds the vanished yesterday; For plated wares of Sheffield stamp We gave the old Aladdin's lamp; 'Tis we are changed; ah, whither went 51 That undesigned abandonment, That wise, unquestioning content, Which could erect its microcosm Out of a weed's neglected blossom, Could call up Arthur and his peers By a low moss's clump of spears, Or, in its shingle trireme launched, Where Charles in some green inlet branched, - we turn life's diary o'er To find but one word,- Nevermore. Could venture for the golden As, at one bound, our swift spring fleece 60 heaps The orchards full of bloom and I only know she came and went. An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went. Oh, when the room grows slowly dim, And life's last oil is nearly spent, One gush of light these eyes will brim, Only to think she came and went. THE CHANGELING I HAD a little daughter, And she was given to me To lead me gently backward To the Heavenly Father's knee, That I, by the force of nature, Might in some dim wise divine The depth of his infinite patience To this wayward soul of mine. I know not how others saw her, But to me she was wholly fair, And the light of the heaven she came from Still lingered and gleamed in her hair; For it was as wavy and golden, And as many changes took, As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples On the yellow bed of a brook. To what can I liken her smiling Upon me, her kneeling lover, As weak, yet as trustful also; Rain falls, suns rise and set, Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet. This child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast: Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, How it leaped from her lips to her | And the light of the heaven she 's To change and change is life, to Of all the myriad moods of mind move and never rest; Not what we are, but what we hope, is best. The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind; Cities rob men of eyes and hands and feet, Patching one whole of many incomplete; The general preys upon the individual mind, And each alone is helpless as the wind. That through the soul come thronging, Which one was e'er so dear, so kind, So beautiful as Longing? The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment, Before the Present poor and bare Can make its sneering comment. Still, through our paltry stir and strife, Glows down the wished Ideal, |