A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown.

Thrice-venerable spot!

River more fateful than the Rubicon !

O'er those red planks, to snatch her diadem,
Man's Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them,
And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.

VII.

Think you these felt no charms

In their gray homesteads and embowered farms?
In household faces waiting at the door

Their evening step should lighten up no more?
In fields their boyish steps had known?

In trees their fathers' hands had set

And which with them had grown

Widening each year their leafy coronet?

Felt they no pang of passionate regret

For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own?

These things are dear to every man that lives,

And life prized more for what it lends than gives;
Yea, many a tie, by iteration sweet,

Strove to detain their fatal feet:

And yet the enduring half they chose,

Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king,—

The invisible things of God before the seen and known :

Therefore their memory inspiration blows

With echoes gathering on from zone to zone,
For manhood is the one immortal thing
Beneath Time's changeful sky,

And, where it lightened once, from age to age
Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage,
That length of days is knowing when to die.

VIII.

What marvellous change of things and men!
She, a world-wandering orphan then,
So mighty now! Those are her streams
That whirl the myriad, myriad wheels
Of all that does and all that dreams,
Of all that thinks and all that feels
Through spaces stretched from sea to sea :
By idle tongues and busy brains,

By who doth right and who refrains,
Hers are our losses and our gains,
Our maker and our victim she.

IX.

Maiden half mortal, half divine,

We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinks

Our hearts were filled with pride's tumultuous wine;
Better to-day who rather feels than thinks:
Yet will some graver thoughts intrude

And cares of nobler mood:

:

They won thee who shall keep thee? From the deeps
Where discrowned empires o'er their ruins brood,

And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps,
I hear the voice as of a mighty wind

From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined,-
"I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I abide
With men whom dust of faction cannot blind
To the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind;
With men, by culture trained and fortified,
Who bitter duty to sweet lusts prefer,
Fearless to counsel and obey:

Conscience my sceptre is, and law my sword,
Not to be drawn in passion or in play,
But terrible to punish and deter,

Implacable as God's word,

Like it a shepherd's crook to them that blindly err,
Your firm-pulsed sires, my martyrs and my saints,
Shoots of that only race whose patient sense
Hath known to mingle flux with permanence,
Rated my chaste denials and restraints
Above the moment's dear-paid paradise:
Beware lest, shifting with Time's gradual creep,
The light that guided shine into your eyes:
The envious Powers of ill nor wink nor sleep;
Be therefore timely wise,

Nor laugh when this one steals and that one lies,
As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies,
Till the deaf fury come your house to sweep!"
I hear the voice and unaffrighted bow:

Ye shall not be prophetic now,

Heralds of ill, that darkening fly

Between my vision and the rainbowed sky,
Or on the left your hoarse forebodings croak

From many a blasted bough

On Igdrasil's storm-sinewed oak,

That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou.

Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast,

For thee I love as those who pardon most.

X.

Away, ungrateful doubt, away!
At least she is our own to-day;
Break into rapture, my song,
Verses, leap forth in the sun,
Bearing the joyance along

Like a train of fire as ye run!
Pause not for choosing of words,
Let them but blossom and sing
Blithe as the orchards and birds
With the new coming of spring!
Dance in your jollity, bells,
Shout, cannon, cease not, ye drums,
Answer, ye hill-sides and dells,
Bow, all ye people, she comes,
Radiant, calm-fronted as when
She hallowed that April day :
Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay,
Softener and strengthener of men,
Freedom, not won by the vain,
Not to be courted in play,
Not to be kept without pain!
Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay,
Handmaid and mistress of all,
Kindler of deed and of thought,
Thou, that to hut and to hall
Equal deliverance brought !
Souls of her martyrs, draw near,
Touch our dull lips with your fire,
That we may praise without fear
Her, our delight, our desire,
Our faith's inextinguishable star,
Our hope, our remembrance, our trust,
Our present, our past, our to be,

Who will mingle her life with our dust
And make us deserve to be free!

NIGHT-WATCHES.

WHILE the slow clock, as they were miser's gold,
Counts and recounts the mornward steps of Time,
The darkness thrills with conscience of each crime
By Death committed, daily grown more cold;
Once more the list of all my wrongs is told,
And ghostly hands stretch to me from my prime,
Helpless farewells, as from an alien clime;
For each new loss redoubles all the old.
This morn 'twas May; the blossoms were astir
With southern wind; but now the boughs are bent
With snow instead of birds, and all things freeze :
How much of all my past is dumb with her,
And of my future, too, for with her went
Half of that world I ever cared to please!
May 13th, 1877.

SONNETS FROM OVER SEA.

I.

ENGLISH BORDER.

As sinks the sun behind yon alien hills,
Whose heather-purpled slopes, in glory round
Flush all my thoughts with momentary gold
What pang of vain regret my fancy thrills!
Here 'tis enchanted ground the peasant tills,
Where the shy ballad dared its blooms unfold,
And memory's glamour makes new sights seem old,
As when our life some vanished dream fulfils;
Yet not to thee belong these painless tears,
Land loved, ere seen; before my darkened eyes,
From far beyond the waters and the
years,

Horizons mute that wait their poet rise;
The stream before me faints and disappears,
And in the shades the western splendour dies.

II.

ON BEING ASKED FOR AN AUTOGRAPH IN VENICE.

Amid these fragments of heroic days,

When thought met deed with mutual passions' leap,
There sits a Fame whose silent trump makes cheap
What short-lived rumour of ourselves we raise ;
They had far other estimate of praise
Who stamped the signet of their soul so deep
In art and action, and whose memories keep
Their height like stars above our misty ways;
In this grave presence to record my name,
Something within me hangs the head and shrinks;
Dull were the soul without some joy in Fame :
Yet here to claim remembrance were, methinks,
Like him who in the desert's awful frame,
Notches his cockney initials on the sphinx.

THE DANCING BEAR.

FAR Over Elf-land poets sketch their sway,
And win their dearest crowns beyond the goal
Of their own conscious purpose; they control
With gossamer threads wide-flown our fancy's play,
And so our action. On my walk to-day
A wallowing bear begged clumsily his toll,
When straight a vision rose of Atta Troll,

And scenes ideal witched mine eyes away.

66

'Merci, Mossiew!" the astonished bear-ward cried, Grateful for thrice his hope to me, the slave

Of partial memory, seeing at his side

A bear immortal; the glad dole I gave
Was none of mine; poor Heine o'er the wide
Atlantic water reached it from his grave.

June 11th, 1875.

SONNET TO F. A.

UNCONSCIOUS as the sunshine, simply sweet,
And generous as that, thou dost not close
Thyself in art, as life were but a rose
To rumple bee-like with luxurious feet;
Thy higher mind therein finds sure retreat,

But not from care of common hopes and woes :

Thee the dark chamber, thee the unfriended knows,
Although no gaping crowds thy praise repeat;
Consummate artist, who life's landscape bleak
Hast brimmed with sun, to many a clouded eye,
Touched to a brighter hue the beggar's cheek,
Hung over orphan lives a gracious sky,

And traced for eyes, that else would vainly seek,
Fair pictures of an angel drawing nigh.
FLORENCE, ITALY, January 1874.

BIRTHDAY VERSES.

WRITTEN IN A CHILD'S ALBUM.

'TWAS sung of old in hut and hall,
How once a king in evil hour
Hung musing o'er his castle wall,
And, lost in idle dreams, let fall'
Into the sea his ring of power.

Then, let him sorrow as he might,
And pledge his daughter and his throne
To who restored the jewel bright,
The broken spell would ne'er unite;
The grim old ocean held his own.

Those awful powers on man that wait,
On man, the beggar or the king,
To hovel bare or hall of state,

A magic ring that masters fate

On each succeeding birthday bring.