Welcome as children; thou upholdest The lone Inventor by his demon haunted; And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted. The beauty of man's soul to man revealing; The arrows from thy quiver Pierce Error's guilty heart, but only pierce for healing. O, whither, whither, glory-winged dreams, From out Life's sweat and turmoil would ye bear me? Shut, gates of fancy, on your golden gleams, This agony of hopeless contrast spare me! Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night! From the vague Future's promise of delight: The ancestral buckler calls, In the high temple of the soul; Where are most sorrows, there the poet's sphere is, To feed the soul with patience, To heal its desolations With words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies. HEBE. I SAW the twinkle of white feet, As, in bare fields, the searching bees Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates; I saw the brimmed bowl in her grasp The earth has drunk the vintage up; Whose treacherous crystal is but Winter's ? O spendthrift, haste! await the gods; Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, THE SEARCH. I WENT to seek for Christ, That first the woods and fields my youth enticed, And to the solitude Allegiance paid; but Winter came and shook Back to the world I turned, For Christ, I said, is King; 'Mid power and wealth I sought, And all the costly offerings I had brought Prizing it more than Christ's own living heart. Of the proud World I shook; Then came dear Love and shared with me his crust, Its rich and dainty fare, Like down seemed Love's coarse pillow to my head, And in a hovel rude, With nought to fence the weather from His heal, Clung round His gracious knee, The broken morsel swelled to goodly store; THE PRESENT CRISIS. WHEN a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west, And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time. Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe, When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro; So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill, In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim. Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by for ever 'twixt that darkness and that light. Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong. Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by. Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the throneYet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own. We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of Fate: But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din, List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within'They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.' Slavery, the earthborn Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Suns of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Groups in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey ;Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play? Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied. Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes--they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design. By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track, Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned. For Humanity sweeps onward; where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; |