ON BOARD THE 76.

Though death came with it? Or evade the test

brute

The fiercer for his hurt. What now

were best?

might of words,

Manhood to back them, constant as

root,

a star;

edged our swords,

No lore of Greece or Rome, No science peddling with the names of things,

Or reading stars to find inglorious fates, Can lift our life with wings

Far from Death's idle gulf that for the many waits,

And lengthen out our dates With that clear fame whose memory sings In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates:

Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all!
Not such the trumpet-call
Of thy diviner mood,
That could thy sons entice
From happy homes and toils, the fruit-
ful nest

Of those half-virtues which the world calls best,

Into War's tumult rude;

But rather far that stern device The sponsors chose that round thy cradle stood

In the dim, unventured wood,

The VERITAS that lurks beneath
The letter's unprolific sheath,
Life of whate'er makes life worth
living,

Seed-grain of high emprise, immortal food,

One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving.

Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind, But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her.

Where faith made whole with deed
Breathes its awakening breath
Into the lifeless creed,

They saw her plumed and mailed, With sweet, stern face unveiled, And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.

IV.

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides

Into the silent hollow of the past;

What is there that abides

To make the next age better for the last?

Is earth too poor to give us Something to live for here that shall outlive us?

Some more substantial boon Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon?

The little that we see
From doubt is never free;
The little that we do

Is but half-nobly true;
With our laborious hiving
What men call treasure, and the gods

call dross,

Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss,

Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,

After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires,

Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,

Are tossed pell-mell together in the

grave.

But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our

fate.

Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;

A seed of sunshine that doth leaven

Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars,

And glorify our clay

With light from fountains elder than the Day;

A conscience more divine than we,
A gladness fed with secret tears,
A vexing, forward-reaching sense
Of some more noble permanence;
A light across the sea,

Which haunts the soul and will not let it be,

Still glimmering from the heights of undegenerate years.

V.

Whither leads the path

To ampler fates that leads?
Not down through flowery
meads,

To reap an aftermath
Of youth's vainglorious weeds,
But up the steep, amid the wrath
And shock of deadly-hostile creeds,
Where the world's best hope and
stay

By battle's flashes gropes a desperate

way,

And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds.

Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword

Dreams in its easeful sheath; But some day the live coal behind the thought,

Whether from Baäl's stone ob

scene,

Or from the shrine serene

Of God's pure altar brought, Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen

Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught,

And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men :"

Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, And cries reproachful: "Was it, then, my praise,

And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth;

I claim of thee the promise of thy youth;