Ulysses' chances re-create ? The tremulous leaves repeat to me No gloomier Orcus swallows thee SHE CAME AND WENT. As a twig trembles, which a bird As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven, As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps The orchards full of bloom and scent, So clove her May my wintry sleeps ; I only know she came and went. An angel stood and met my gaze, O, when the room grows slowly dim, THE CHANGELING. I HAD a little daughter, And she was given to me To lead me gently backward To the Heavenly Father's knee, She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth, And it hardly seemed a day, When a troop of wandering angels Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari But loosed the hampering strings, And when they had opened her cagedoor, My little bird used her wings. But they left in her stead a changeling, That seems like her bud in full blossom, Alone 'neath the awful sky. As weak, yet as trustful also; For the whole year long I see All the wonders of faithful Nature Still worked for the love of me ; Winds wander, and dews drip earthward, 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; The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind; Cities rob men of eyes and hands and feet, Patching one whole of many incom. plete; The general preys upon the individual mind, And each alone is helpless as the wind. Each man is some man's servant; every soul Is by some other's presence quite discrowned; Each owes the next through all the imperfect round, Yet not with mutual help; each man is his own goal, And the whole earth must stop to pay him toll. Here, life the undiminished man demands; New faculties stretch out to meet new wants; What Nature asks, that Nature also grants; Here man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and hands, And to his life is knit with hourly bands. Come out, then, from the old thoughts and old ways, Before you harden to a crystal cold Which the new life can shatter, but not mould; Freedom for you still waits, still, looking backward, stays, But widens still the irretrievable space. But for the Oppressed, their darkness | And twined with golden threads his and their woe, Their grinding centuries, what Muse futile snare, Ah! while the tyrant deemed it still The afar, should pour Rain, lark-like, her fancies, His dreaming hands wander Mid heart's-ease and pansies; "T is a dream! 'T is a vision!' Shrieks Mammon aghast; "The day's broad derision Will chase it at last; Ye are mad, ye have taken A slumbering kraken For firm land of the Past!" Ah! if he awaken, God shield us all then, IX. Since first I heard our North-wind blow, Since first I saw Atlantic throw On our grim rocks his thunderous snow, I loved thee, Freedom; as a boy Did with a Grecian joy But I have learned to love thee now Without the helm upon thy gleaming brow, A maiden mild and undefiled Like her who bore the world's redeeming child; And surely never did thine altars With purer fires than now in France; Wrong's shadow, backward cast, Of the dead, blaspheming Past, O'er the shapes of fallen giants, His own unburied brood, Whose dead hands clench defiance At the overpowering Good : And down the happy future runs a flood Of prophesying light; It shows an Earth no longer stained with blood, Blossom and fruit where now we see the bud Of Brotherhood and Right. ANTI-APIS. PRAISEST Law, friend? We, too, love it much as they that love it best; 'T is the deep, august foundation, where. on Peace and Justice rest; |