And fairer stars, with whose calm height | my soul

Finds nearer sympathy than with my herd Of earthen souls, whose vision's scanty ring Makes me its prisoner to beat my wings Against the cold bars of their unbelief, Knowing in vain my own free heaven beyond.

O God! this world, so crammed with eager life,

That comes and goes and wanders back to silence

Like the idle wind, which yet man's shaping mind

Can make his drudge to swell the longing sails

Of highest endeavor, - this mad, unthrift world,

Which, every hour, throws life enough

Our great thoughts, white and godlike, to shine down

The future, Life, the irredeemable block, Which one o'er-hasty chisel-dint oft mars, Scanting our room to cut the features out Of our full hope, so forcing us to crown With a mean head the perfect limbs, or leave

The god's face glowing o'er a satyr's trunk, Failure's brief epitaph.

Yes, Europe's world Reels on to judgment; there the common need,

Losing God's sacred use, to be a bond 'Twixt Me and Thee, sets each one scowl

ingly

O'er his own selfish hoard at bay; no state,
Knit strongly with eternal fibres up
Of all men's separate and united weals,
Self-poised and sole as stars, yet one as
light,

Holds up a shape of large Humanity
To which by natural instinct every man
Pays loyalty exulting, by which all

Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird,

Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me
A swift-betraying vision's Ganymede,

ends.

Here am I; for what end God knows, not I; Westward still points the inexorable soul: Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea, The beating heart of this great enterprise, Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death;

This have I mused on, since mine eye could first

Among the stars distinguish and with joy
Rest on that God-fed Pharos of the north,
On some blue promontory of heaven lighted
That juts far out into the upper sea;
To this one hope my heart hath clung for
years,

As would a foundling to the talisman
Hung round his neck by hands he knew not

whose;

A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside,

ends; Great days have ever such a morning-red, On such a base great futures are built up, And aspiration, though not put in act, Comes back to ask its plighted troth again, Still watches round its grave the unlaid ghost

Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes, Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak

As shadows of bare trees upon the snow, Bound freezing there by the unpitying

moon.

While other youths perplexed their mandolins,

Praying that Thetis would her fingers twine

In the loose glories of her lover's hair,
And wile another kiss to keep back day,

I, stretched beneath the many-centuried shade

Of some writhed oak, the wood's Laocoön,
Did of my hope a dryad mistress make,
Whom I would woo to meet me privily,
Or underneath the stars, or when the

moon

Flecked all the forest floor with scattered pearls.

O days whose memory tames to fawning down

The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck!

I know not when this hope enthralled me first,

But from my boyhood up I loved to hear The tall pine-forests of the Apennine Murmur their hoary legends of the sea, Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld The sudden dark of tropic night shut down O'er the huge whisper of great watery wastes,

The while a pair of herons trailingly Flapped inland, where some league-wide river hurled

The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred

By any but the North-wind's hurrying keels.

And not the pines alone; all sights and

sounds

To my world-seeking heart paid fealty,
And catered for it as the Cretan bees
Brought honey to the baby Jupiter,
Who in his soft hand crushed a violet,
Godlike foremusing the rough thunder's
gripe;

Then did I entertain the poet's song,
My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er
That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell,
I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains
Whose adamantine links, his manacles,
The western main shook growling, and
still gnawed.

I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale
Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne's
keel

Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland

shore:

The trial still is the strength's complement,
And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales
The sheer heights of supremest purposes
Is steeper to the angel than the child.
Chances have laws as fixed as planets have,
And disappointment's dry and bitter root,
Envy's harsh berries, and the choking
pool

Of the world's scorn, are the right mother

milk

THE tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies,

Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries;

You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art,

They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart.

Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak,

Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke;

And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone,

Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone.

It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough,

A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough;

The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines.

Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right

To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light;

And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells

Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells.