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;
In their unmonarched eyes says day is
And yet the eternal sorrow

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 with-
ered 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,

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.

hands

Grows young and noble; unto thee the
Öppressor

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

eyes,

From the soul's deeps

It throbs and leaps;

noble 'neath foul rags beholds his long-lost brother.

thee the Martyr looketh, and his fires