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THE DARKENED MIND.—WHAT RABBI JEHOSHA SAID. 407

First-born, for whom by day and night

I yearn,

Balanced and just are all of God's de

crees;

Thou art avenged, my first-born, sleep in peace!"

THE DARKENED MIND. THE fire is burning clear and blithely, Pleasantly whistles the winter wind; We are about thee, thy friends and kindred,

On us all flickers the firelight kind; There thou sittest in thy wonted corner Lone and awful in thy darkened mind. There thou sittest; now and then thou moanest;

Thou dost talk with what we cannot see, Lookest at us with an eye so doubtful, It doth put us very far from thee; There thou sittest; we would fain be nigh thee,

But we know that it can never be.

We can touch thee, still we are no

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WHAT RABBI JEHOSHA SAID.

RABBI JEHOSHA used to say
That God made angels every day,
Perfect as Michael and the rest
First brooded in creation's nest,
Whose only office was to cry
Hosanna! once, and then to die;
Or rather, with Life's essence blent,
To be led home from banishment.

Rabbi Jehosha had the skill

To know that Heaven is in God's will;
And doing that, though for a space
One heart-beat long, may win a grace
As full of grandeur and of glow
As Princes of the Chariot know.

'T were glorious, no doubt, to be
One of the strong-winged Hierarchy,
To burn with Seraphs, or to shine
With Cherubs, deathlessly divine;
Yet I, perhaps, poor earthly clod,
Could I forget myself in God,
Could I but find my nature's clew
Simply as birds and blossoms do,
And but for one rapt moment know
'Tis Heaven must come, not we must

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Elfish daughter of Apollo !

Thee, from thy father stolen and bound
To serve in Vulcan's clangorous smithy
Prometheus (primal Yankee) found,
And, when he had tampered with thee,
(Too confiding little maid!)
In a reed's precarious hollow
To our frozen earth conveyed :
For he swore I know not what;
Endless ease should be thy lot,
Pleasure that should never falter,
Life-long play, and not a duty
Save to hover o'er the altar,
Vision of celestial beauty,
Fed with precious woods and spices,
Then, perfidious! having got
Thee in the net of his devices,

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Now in the ample chimney-place,
To honor thy acknowledged race,
We crown thee high with laurel good,
Thy shining father's sacred wood,
Which, guessing thy ancestral right,
Sparkles and snaps his dumb delight,
And, at thy touch, poor outcast one,
Feels through his gladdened fibres go
The tingle and thrill and vassal glow
Of instincts loyal to the sun.

VI.

O thou of home the guardian Lar,
And, when our earth hath wandered far
Into the cold, and deep snow covers
The walks of our New England lovers,
Their sweet secluded evening-star!
'T was with thy rays the English Muse
Ripened her mild domestic hues;
'T was by thy flicker that she conned
The fireside wisdom that enrings
With light from heaven familiar things;
By thee she found the homely faith
In whose mild eyes thy comfort stay'th,
When Death, extinguishing his torch,
Gropes for the latch-string in the porch;
The love that wanders not beyond
His earliest nest, but sits and sings
While children smooth his patient
wings;

Therefore with thee I love to read
Our brave old poets: at thy touch how
stirs

Life in the withered words! how swift

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While the gray snow-storm, held aloof,
To softest outline rounds the roof,
Or the rude North with baffled strain
Shoulders the frost-starred window.
pane!

Now the kind nymph to Bacchus borne
By Morpheus' daughter, she that seems
Gifted upon her natal morn

By him with fire, by her with dreams,
Nicotia, dearer to the Muse
Than all the grapes' bewildering juice,
We worship, unforbid of thee;
And, as her incense floats and curls
In airy spires and wayward whirls,
Or poises on its tremulous stalk
A flower of frailest revery,
So winds and loiters, idly free,
The current of unguided talk,
Now laughter-rippled, and now caught
In smooth, dark pools of deeper
thought.
Meanwhile thou mellowest every word,
A sweetly unobtrusive third;

For thou hast magic beyond wine,
To unlock natures each to each;
The unspoken thought thou canst di-
vine;

Thou fillest the pauses of the speech
With whispers that to dream-land reach
And frozen fancy-springs unchain
In Arctic outskirts of the brain;
Sun of all inmost confidences !
To thy rays doth the heart unclose
Its formal calyx of pretences,
That close against rude day's offences,
And open its shy midnight rose.

VIII.

Thou holdest not the master key With which thy Sire sets free the mys tic gates

Of Past and Future: not for common fates

Do they wide open fling,

And, with a far-heard ring,

Swing back their willing valves melo diously;

Only to ceremonial days,

And great processions of imperial song
That set the world at gaze,

Doth such high privilege belong :
But thou a postern-door canst ope
To humbler chambers of the selfsame
palace

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The terror comes to me subdued
And charmed by distance,
To deepen the habitual mood
Of my existence.

Are those, I muse, the Easter chimes?
And listen, weaving careless rhymes
While the loud city's griefs and crimes
Pay gentle allegiance

To the fine quiet that sublimes
These dreamy regions.

And when the storm o'erwhelms the shore,

I watch entranced as, o'er and o'er,
The light revolves amid the roar
So still and saintly,

Now large and near, now more and

more

Withdrawing faintly.

This, too, despairing sailors see
Flash out the breakers 'neath their lee
In sudden snow, then lingeringly
Wane tow'rd eclipse,

While through the dark the shuddering

sea

Gropes for the ships.

And is it right, this mood of mind
That thus, in revery enshrined,
Can in the world mere topics find
For musing stricture,
Seeing the life of humankind
Only as picture?

The events in line of battle go;

In vain for me their trumpets blow
As unto him that lieth low

In death's dark arches,

And through the sod hears throbbing slow

The muffled marches.

O Duty, am I dead to thee
In this my cloistered ecstasy,
In this lone shallop on the sea

That drifts tow'rd Silence?
And are those visioned shores I se
But sirens' islands?

My Dante frowns with lip-locked mien, As who would say, ""T is those, I ween, Whom lifelong armor-chafe makes lean That win the laurel "

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The Pope himself to see in dream
Before his lenten vision gleam,

He lies there, the sogdologer !

His precious flanks with stars besprent,

Worthy to swim in Castaly! The friend by whom such gifts are sent, For him shall bumpers full be spent,

His health! be Luck his fast ally! I see him trace the wayward brook Amid the forest mysteries, Where at their shades shy aspens look, Or where, with many a gurgling crook, It croons its woodland histories.

I see leaf-shade and sun-fleck lend

Their tremulous, sweet vicissitude To smooth, dark pool, to crinkling bend,

O, stew him, Ann, as 't were your friend,

With amorous solicitude!)

I see him step with caution due,

Soft as if shod with moccasins,

Grave as in church, for who plies you, Sweet craft, is safe as in a pew

From all our common stock o' sins.

The unerring fly I see him cast,

That as a rose-leaf falls as soft, A flash! a whirl! he has him fast! We tyros, how that struggle last

Confuses and appalls us oft.

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The friend who gave our board such gust,

Life's care may he o'erstep it half, And, when Death hooks him, as he must,

He 'll do it handsomely, I trust,

And John H-write his epitaph!

O, born beneath the Fishes' sign,

Of constellations happiest,

May he somewhere with Walton dine, May Horace send him Massic wine, And Burns Scotch drink, the nappiest !

And when they come his deeds to weigh,

And how he used the talents his, One trout-scale in the scales he'll lay (If trout had scales), and 't will outsway

The wrong side of the balances.

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