Proverbial Philosophy / The First and Second Series

SECOND SERIES.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

INTRODUCTORY.

Come again, and greet me as a friend, fellow-pilgrim upon life's highway,

Leave awhile the hot and dusty road, to loiter in the greenwood of Reflection.

Come unto my cool dim grotto, that is watered by the rivulet of truth,

And over whose time-stained rock climb the fairy flowers of content;

Here, upon this mossy bank of leisure fling thy load of cares,

Taste my simple store, and rest one soothing hour.

Behold, I would count thee for a brother, and commune with thy charitable soul;

Though wrapt within the mantle of a prophet, I stand mine own weak scholar.

Heed no disciple for a teacher, if knowledge be not found upon his tongue;

For vanity and folly were the lessons these lips untaught could give:

The precious staple of my merchandise cometh from a better country,

The harvest of my reaping sprang of foreign seed:

And this poor pensioner of Mercy—should he boast of merit?

The grafted stock,—should that be proud of apples not its own?

Into the bubbling brook I dip my hermit shell;

Man receiveth as a cup, but Wisdom is the river.

Moreover, for this fillagree of fancy, this Oriental garnish of similitude,

Alas, the world is old,—and all things old within it:

I walk a trodden path, I love the good old ways;

Prophets, and priests, and kings have tuned the harp I faintly touch.

Truth, in a garment of the past, is my choice and simple theme;

No truth is new to-day: and the mantle was another's.

Still, there is an insect swarm, the buzzing cloud of imagery,

Mote-like steaming on my sight, and thronging my reluctant mind;

The memories of studious culling, and multiplied analogies of nature,

Fresh feelings unrepressed, welling from the heart spontaneous,

Facts, and comparisons, and meditative atoms, gathered on the heap of combination,

Mingle in the fashion of my speech with gossamer dreams of Reverie.

I need not beat the underwood for game; my pheasants flock upon the lawn,

And gamboling hares disport fearless in my dewy field;

I roam no heath-empurpled hills, wearily watching for a covey,

But thoughts fly swift to my decoy, eager to be caught;

I sit no quiet angler, lingering patiently for sport,

But spread my nets for a draught, and take the glittering shoal;

I chase no solitary stag, tracking it with breathless toil,

But hunt with Aurung-zebe, and spear surrounded thousands.

What then,—count ye this a boast?—sweet charity, think it other,

For the dog-fish and poisonous ray are captured in the mullet-haul:

The crane and the kite are of my thoughts, alike with the partridge and the quail,

And unclean meats as of the clean hang upon my Seric shambles.

—How saith he? shall a man deceive, dressing up his jackal as a lion?

Or colour in staid hues of fact the changing vest of falsehood?—

Brother, unwittingly he may; doubtless, unwillingly he doth:

For men are full of fault, and how should he be righteous?

Carefully my garden hath been weeded, yet shall it be foul with thistle;

My grapery is diligently thinned, and yet many berries will be sour:

From my nets have I flung the bad away, to my small skill and caution;

Yet may some slimy snake have counted for an eel.

The rudder of Man's best hope cannot always steer himself from error;

The arrow of Man's straightest aim flieth short of truth.

Thus, the confession of sincerity visit not as if it were presumption:

Nor own me for a leader, where thy reason is not guide.

OF CHEERFULNESS.

Take courage, prisoner of time, for there be many comforts,

Cease thy labour in the pit, and bask awhile with truants in the sun;

Be cheerful, man of care, for great is the multitude of chances,

Burst thy fetters of anxiety, and walk among the citizens of ease:

Wherefore dost thou doubt? if present good is round thee,

It may be well to look for change, but to trust in a continuance is better;

Whilst, at the crisis of adversity, to hope for some amends were wisdom,

And cheerfully to bear thy cross in patient strength is duty.

I speak of common troubles, and the petty plagues of life,

The phantom-spies of Unbelief, that lurk about his outposts:

Sharp suspicion, dull distrust, and sullen stern moroseness

Are captains in that locust swarm to lead the cloudy host.

Thou hast need of fortitude and faith, for the adversaries come on thickly,

And he that fled hath added wings to his pursuing foes;

Fight them, and the cravens flee; thy boldness is their panic;

Fear them, and thy treacherous heart hath lent the ranks a legion:

Among their shouts of victory resoundeth the wail of Heraclitus,

While Democrite, confident and cheerful, hath plucked up the standard of their camp.

Not few nor light are the burdens of life; then load it not with heaviness of spirit;

Sicknesses, and penury, and travail,—there be real ills enow:

We are wandering benighted, with a waning moon; plunge not rashly into jungles,

Where cold and poisonous damps will quench the torch of hope:

The tide is strong against us; good oarsmen, pull or perish,—

If your arms be slack for fear, ye shall not stem the torrent.

A wise traveller goeth on cheerily, through fair weather or foul;

He knoweth that his journey must be sped, so he carrieth his sunshine with him.

Calamities come not as a curse,—nor prosperity for other than a trial;

Struggle,—thou art better for the strife, and the very energy shall hearten thee.

Good is taught in a Spartan school,—hard lessons and a rough discipline;

But evil cometh idly of itself, in the luxury of Capuan holidays:

And Wisdom will go bravely forth to meet the chastening scourge,

Enduring with a thankful heart that punishment of Love.

There be three chief rivers of despondency: sin, sorrow, fear;

Sin is the deepest, sorrow hath its shallows, and fear is a noisy rapid:

But even to the darkest holes in guilt's profoundest river

Hope can pierce with quickening ray, and all those depths are lightened.

So long as there is mercy in a God, hope is the privilege of creatures,

And so soon as there is penitence in creatures, that hope is exalted into duty.

Verily, consider this for courage; that the fearful and the unbelieving

Are classed with idolaters and liars, because they trusted not in God:

For it is none other than selfish sin, a hard and proud ingratitude,

Where seeming repentance is herald of despair, instead of hope's forerunner.

Moreover, in thy day of grief,—for friends, or fame, or fortune,

Well I wot the heart shall ache, and mind be numbed in torpor;

Let nature weep; leave her alone; the freshet of her sorrow must run off;

And sooner will the lake be clear, relieved of turbid floodings.

Yet see that her license hath a limit; with the novelty her agony is over;

Hasten in that earliest calm, to tie her in the leash with Reason.

For regrets are an enervating folly, and the season for energy is come,

Yea rather, that the future may repair with diligence the ruins of the past.

Again, for empty fears, the harassings of possible calamity,

Pray, and thou shalt prosper; trust in God, and tread them down.

Yield to the phantasy,—thou sinnest; resist it, He will aid thee:

Out of Him there is no help, nor any sober courage.

Feeble is the comfort of the faithless, a man without a God;

Who dare counsel such an one to fling away his fears?

Fear is the heritage of him, a portion wise and merciful,

To drive the trembler into safety, if haply he may turn and flee:

Nevertheless, let him reckon an he will, that all be counteth casual

May as well be for him as against him; dice have many sides:

And, even as in ailments of the body, diseases follow closely upon dreads,

So, with infirmities of mind, is fear the pallid harbinger of failure.

It were wise to walk undaunted even in an accidental chaos,

For the brave man is at peace, and free to get the mastery of circumstance.

The stoutest armour of defence is that which is worn within the bosom,

And the weapon that no enemy can parry, is a bold and cheerful spirit:

Catapults in old war worked like Titans, crushing foes with rocks;

So doth a strong-springed heart throw back every load on its assailants.

I went heavily for cares, and fell into the trance of sorrow;

And behold, a vision in my trance, and my ministering angel brought it.

There stood a mountain huge and steep, the awful Rock of Ages;

The sun upon its summit, and storms midway, and deep ravines at foot.

And, as I looked, a dense black cloud, suddenly dropping from the thunder,

Filled, like a cataract with yeasty foam, a narrow smiling valley:

Close and hard that vaporous mass seemed to press the ground,

And lamentable sounds came up, as of some that were smothering beneath.

Then, as I walked upon the mountain, clear in summer's noon,

For charity I called aloud, Ho! climb up hither to the sunshine.

And even like a stream of light my voice had pierced the mist;

I saw below two families of men, and knew their names of old:

Courage, struggling through the darkness, stout of heart and gladsome,

Ran up the shining ladder which the voice of Hope had made;

And tripping lightly by his side, a sweet-eyed helpmate with him,

I looked upon her face to welcome pleasant Cheerfulness;

And a babe was cradled in her bosom, a laughing little prattler,

The child of Cheerfulness and Courage,—could his name be other than Success?

So, from his happy wife, when they both stood beside me on the mountain,

The fond father took that babe, and set him on his shoulder in the sunshine.

Again I peered into the valley, for I heard a gasping moan,

A desolate weak cry, as muffled in the vapours.

So down that crystal shaft into the poisonous mine

I sped for charity to seek and save,—and those I sought fled from me.

At length, I spied, far distant, a trembling withered dwarf

Who crouched beneath the cloak of a tall and spectral mourner:

Then I knew Cowardice and Gloom, and followed them on in darkness,

Guided by their rustling robes and moans and muffled cries,

Until in a suffocating pit the wretched pair had perished,—

And lo, their whitening bones were shaping out an epitaph of Failure.

So I saw that despondency was death, and flung my burdens from me,

And, lightened by that effort, I was raised above the world;

Yea, in the strangeness of my vision, I seemed to soar on wings,

And the names they called my wings were Cheerfulness and Wisdom.

OF YESTERDAY.

Speak, poor almsman of to-day, whom none can assure of a to-morrow,

Tell out, with honest heart, the price thou settest upon yesterday.

Is it then a writing in the dust, traced by the finger of idleness,

Which Industry, clean housewife, can wipe away for ever?

Is it as a furrow on the sand, fashioned by the toying waves,

Quickly to be trampled then again by the feet of the returning tide?

Is it as the pale blue smoke, rising from a peasant's hovel,

That melted into limpid air, before it topped the larches?

Is it but a vision, unstable and unreal, which wise men soon forget?

Is it as the stranger of a night,—gone, we heed not whither?

Alas! thou foolish heart, whose thoughts are but as these,

Alas! deluded soul, that hopeth thus of Yesterday.

For, behold,—those temples of Ellora, the Brahmin's rock-built shrine,

Behold—yon granite cliff, which the North Sea buffeteth in vain,—

That stout old forest fir,—these waking verities of life,

This guest abiding ever, not strange, nor a servant, but a son,—

Such, O man, are vanity and dreams, transient as a rainbow on the cloud,

Weighed against that solid fact, thine ill-remembered Yesterday.

Come, let me show thee an ensample, where Nature shall instruct us;

Luxuriantly the arguments for truth spring native in her gardens.

Seek we yonder woodman of the plain; he is measuring his axe to the elm,

And anon the sturdy strokes ring upon the wintry air:

Eagerly the village school-boys cluster on the tightened rope,

Shouting, and bending to the pull, or lifted from the ground elastic;

The huge tree boweth like Sisera, boweth to its foes with faintness,—

Its sinews crack,—deep groans declare the reeling anguish of Goliath,

The wedge is driven home,—and the saw is at its heart,—and lo, with solemn slowness,

The shuddering monarch riseth from his throne,—toppled with a crash,—and is fallen!

Now shall the mangled stump teach proud man a lesson:

Now, can we from that elm-tree's sap distil the wine of Truth.

Heed ye those hundred rings, concentric from the core,

Eddying in various waves to the red bark's shore-like rim?

These be the gatherings of yesterdays, present all to-day,

This is the tree's judgment, self-history that cannot be gainsaid:

Seven years agone there was a drought,—and the seventh ring is narrowed;

The fifth from hence was half a deluge,—the fifth is cellular and broad.

Thus, Man, thou art a result, the growth of many yesterdays,

That stamp thy secret soul with marks of weal or woe:

Thou art an almanack of self, the living record of thy deeds;

Spirit hath its scars as well as body, sore and aching in their season:

Here is a knot,—it was a crime; there is a canker,—selfishness;

Lo, here, the heart-wood rotten; lo, there, perchance, the sap-wood sound.

Nature teacheth not in vain; thy works are in thee, of thee;

Some present evil bent hath grown of older errors:

And what if thou be walking now uprightly? Salve not thy wounds with poison,

As if a petty goodness of to-day hath blotted out the sin of yesterday:

It is well, thou hast life and light; and the Hewer showeth mercy,

Dressing the root, pruning the branch, and looking for thy tardy fruits;

But, even here as thou standest, cheerful belike and careless,

The stains of ancient evil are upon thee, the record of thy wrong is in thee:

For, a curse of many yesterdays is thine, many yesterdays of sin,

That, haply heeded little now, shall blast thy many morrows.

Shall then a man reck nothing, but hurl mad defiance at his Judge,

Knowing that less than an Omnipotent cannot make the has been, not been?

He ought,—so Satan spake; he must,—so Atheism urgeth;

He may,—it was the libertine's thought; he doth,—the bad world said it.

But thou of humbler heart, thou student wiser for simplicity,

While Nature warneth thee betimes, heed the loving counsel of Religion.

True, this change is good, and penitence most precious;

But trust not thou thy change, nor rest upon repentance:

For all we are corrupted at the core, smooth as surface seemeth;

What health can bloom in a beautiful skin, when rottenness hath fed upon the bones?

And guilt is parcel of us all; not thou, sweet nursling of affection,

Art spotless, though so passing fair,—nor thou, mild patriarch of virtue.

Behold then the better Tree of Life, free unto us all for grafting,

Cut thee from the hollow root of self, to be budded on a richer Vine.

Be desperate, O man, as of evil, so of good; tear that tunic from thee;

The past can never be retrieved, be the present what it may.

Vain is the penance and the scourge, vain the fast and vigil:

The fencer's cautious skill to-day, can this erase his scars?

It is Man's to famish as a faquir, it is Man's to die a devotee,

Light is the torture and the toil, balanced with the wages of Eternity:

But, it is God's to yearn in love, on the humblest, the poorest, and the worst,

For He giveth freely, as a king, asking only thanks for mercy.

Look upon this noble-hearted Substitute; seeing thy woes, He pitied thee,

Bowed beneath the mountain of thy sin, and perished,—but for Godhead;

There stood the Atlas in his power, and Prometheus in his love is there,

Emptying on wretched men the blessings earned from Heaven:

Put them not away, hide them in thy heart, poor and penitent receiver,

Be gratitude thy counseller to good, and wholesome fear unto obedience;

Remember, the pruning-knife is keen, cutting cankers even from the vine;

Remember, twelve were chosen, and one among them liveth—in perdition.

Yea,—for standing unatoned, the soul is a bison on the prairie,

Hunted by those trooping wolves, the many sinful yesterdays:

And it speedeth a terrified Deucalion, flinging back the pebble in his flight,

The pebble that must add one more to those pursuing ghosts.

O man, there is a storm behind should drive thy bark to haven;

The foe, the foe is on thy track, patient, certain, and avenging;

Day by day, solemnly, and silently, followeth the fearful past,—

His step is lame, but sure; for he catcheth the present in eternity:

And how to escape that foe, the present-past in future?

How to avert that fate, living consequence of causes unexistent?—

Boldly we must overleap his birth, and date above his memories,

Grafted on the living Tree, that WAS before a yesterday:

No refuge of a younger birth than one that saw creation

Can hide the child of time from still condemning Yesterday.

There, is the Sanctuary-city, mocking at the wrath of thine Avenger,

Close at hand, with the wicket on the latch; haste for thy life, poor hunted one!

The gladiator, Guilt, fighteth as of old, armed with net and dagger;

Snaring in the mesh of yesterdays, stabbing with the poignard of to-day:

Fly, thy sword is broken at the hilt; fly, thy shield is shivered;

Leap the barriers, and baffle him: the arena of the past is his.

The bounds of Guilt are the cycles of Time: thou must be safe within Eternity;

The arms of God alone shall rescue thee from Yesterday.

OF TO-DAY.

Now, is the constant syllable ticking from the clock of time,

Now, is the watchword of the wise, Now, is on the banner of the prudent.

Cherish thy to-day and prize it well, or ever it be gulphed into the past,

Husband it, for who can promise, if it shall have a morrow?

Behold, thou art,—it is enough; that present care be thine;

Leave thou the past to thy Redeemer, entrust the future to thy Friend;

But for To-day, child of man, tend thou charily the minutes,

The harvest of thy yesterday, the seed-corn of thy morrow.

Last night died its day; and the deeds thereof were judged:

Thou didst lay thee down as in a shroud, in darkness and death-like slumber:

But at the trumpet of this morn, waking the world to resurrection,

Thou didst arise, like others, to live a new day's life:

Fear, lest folly give thee cause to mourn its passing presence,

Fear, that to-morrow's sigh be not, would God it had not dawned!

For, To-day the lists are set, and thou must bear thee bravely,

Tilting for honour, duty, life, or death without reproach:

To-day, is the trial of thy fortitude, O dauntless Mandan chief;

To-day, is thy watch, O sentinel; To-day, thy reprieve, O captive:

What more? To-day is the golden chance wherewith to snatch fruition,—

Be glad, grateful, temperate: there are asps among the figs.

For the potter's clay is in thy hands,—to mould it or to mar it at thy will,

Or idly to leave it in the sun, an uncouth lump to harden.

O bright presence of To-day, let me wrestle with thee, gracious angel,

I will not let thee go, except thou bless me; bless me, then, To-day:

O sweet garden of To-day, let me gather of thee, precious Eden;

I have stolen bitter knowledge, give me fruits of life To-day:

O true temple of To-day, let me worship in thee, glorious Zion;

I find none other place nor time, than where I am To-day:

O living rescue of To-day, let me run into thee, ark of refuge:

I see none other hope nor chance, but standeth in To-day:

O rich banquet of To-day, let me feast upon thee, saving manna;

I have none other food nor store, but daily bread To-day!

Behold, thou art pilot of the ship, and owner of that freighted galleon,

Competent, with all thy weakness, to steer into safety or be lost:

Compass and chart are in thy hand: roadstead and rocks thou knowest;

Thou art warned of reefs and shallows; thou beholdest the harbour and its lights.

What? shall thy wantonness or sloth drive the gallant vessel on the breakers?

What? shall the helmsman's hand wear upon the black lee shore?

Vain is that excuse; thou canst escape: thy mind is responsible for wrong:

Vain that murmur; thou mayst live: thy soul is debtor for the right.

To-day, in the voyage of thy life down the dark tide of time,

Stand boldly to thy tiller, guide thee by the pole-star, and be safe;

To-day, passing near the sunken rocks, the quicksands and whirlpools of probation,

Leave awhile the rudder to swing round, give the wind its heading, and be wrecked.

The crisis of man's destiny is Now, a still recurring danger;

Who can tell the trials and temptations coming with the coming hour?

Thou standest a target-like Sebastian, and the arrows whistle near thee;

Who knoweth when he may be hit? for great is the company of archers.

Each breath is burdened with a bidding, and every minute hath its mission;

For spirits, good and bad, cluster on the thickly-peopled air:

Sin may blast thee, grace may bless thee, good or ill this hour:

Chance, and change, and doubt, and fear, are parasites of all.

A man's life is a tower, with a staircase of many steps,

That, as he toileth upward, crumble successively behind him:

No going back; the past is an abyss; no stopping, for the present perisheth;

But ever hasting on, precarious on the foothold of To-day;

Our cares are all To-day; our joys are all To-day;

And in one little word, our life, what is it, but—To-day?

OF TO-MORROW.

There is a floating island, forward on the stream of time,

Buoyant with fermenting air, and borne along the rapids;

And on that island is a siren, singing sweetly as she goeth,

Her eyes are bright with invitation, and allurement lurketh in her cheeks;

Many lovers, vainly pursuing, follow her beckoning finger,

Many lovers seek her still, even to the cataract of death.

To-morrow is that island, a vain and foolish heritage,

And, laughing with seductive lips, Delusion hideth there:

Often the precious present is wasted in visions of the future,

And coy To-morrow cometh not with prophecies fulfilled.

There is a fairy skiff, plying on the sea of life,

And charitably toiling still to save the shipwrecked crews;

Within, kindly patient, sitteth a gentle mariner,

Piloting, through surf and strait, the fragile barks of men:

How cheering is her voice, how skilfully she guideth,

How nobly leading onward yet, defying even death!

To-morrow is that skiff, a wise and welcome rescue,

And, full of gladdening words and looks, that mariner is Hope:

Often, the painful present is comforted by flattering the future,

And kind To-morrow beareth half the burdens of To-day.

To-morrow, whispereth weakness: and To-morrow findeth him the weaker;

To-morrow, promiseth conscience; and behold, no To-day for a fulfilment.

O name of happy omen unto youth, O bitter word of terror to the dotard,

Goal of folly's lazy wish, and sorrow's ever-coming friend;

Fraud's loophole,—caution's hint,—and trap to catch the honest,—

Thou wealth to many poor, disgrace to many noble,

Thou hope and fear, thou weal and woe, thou remedy, thou ruin,

How thickly swarms of thought are clustering round To-morrow!

The hive of memory increaseth, to every day its cell;

There is the labour stored, the honey or corruption;

Each morn the bees fly forth, to fill the growing comb,

And levy golden tribute of the uncomplaining flowers:

To-morrow is their care; they toil for rest to-morrow;

But man deferreth duty's task, and loveth ease to-day.

To-morrow, is that lamp upon the marsh, which a traveller never reacheth;

To-morrow, the rainbow's cup, coveted prize of ignorance;

To-morrow, the shifting anchorage, dangerous trust of mariners;

To-morrow, the wrecker's beacon, wily snare of the destroyer.

Reconcile convictions with delay, and To-morrow is a fatal lie;

Frighten resolutions into action, To-morrow is a wholesome truth:

I must, for I fear To-morrow; this is the Cassava's food;

Why should I? let me trust To-morrow,—this is the Cassava's poison.

Lo, it is the even of To-day,—a day so lately a To-morrow;

Where are those high resolves, those hopes of yesternight?

O faint fond heart, still shall thy whisper be, To-morrow,

And must the growing avalanche of sin roll down that easy slope?

Alas, it is ponderous, and moving on in might, that a Sisyphus may not stop it;

But haste thee with the lever of a prayer, and stem its strength To-day:

For its race may speedily be run, and this poor hut, thyself,

Be whelmed in death and suffocating guilt, that dreary Alpine snow-wreath.

Pensioner of life, be wise, and heed a brother's counsel;

I also am a beadsman, with scrip and staff as thou:

Wouldest thou be bold against the past, and all its evil memories,

Wouldest thou be safe amid the present, its dangers and temptations,

Wouldest thou be hopeful of the future, vague though it be and endless?

Haste thee, repent, believe, obey! thou standest in the courage of a legion.

Commend the Past to God, with all its irrevocable harm,

Humbly, but in cheerful trust, and banish vain regrets;

Come to Him, continually come, casting all the Present at His feet,

Boldly, but in prayerful love, and fling off selfish cares;

Commit the Future to His will, the viewless fated future;

Zealously go forward with integrity, and God will bless thy faith.

For that, feeble as thou art, there is with thee a mighty Conqueror,

Thy Friend, the same for ever, yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow;

That Friend, changeless as eternity, Himself shall make thee friends

Of those thy foes transformed, yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow.

OF AUTHORSHIP.

Great is the dignity of Authorship: I magnify mine office;

Albeit in much feebleness I hold it thus unworthily.

For it is to be one of a noble band, the welfare of the world,

Whose haunt is on the lips of men, whose dwelling in their hearts,

Who are precious in the retrospect of Memory, and walk among the visions of Hope,

Who commune with the good for everlasting, and call the wisest, brother,

Whose voice hath burst the Silence, and whose light is flung upon the Darkness,

—Flashing jewels on a robe of black, and harmony bounding out of chaos,—

Who gladden empires with their wisdom, and bless to the farthest generation,

Doers of illimitable good, gainers of inestimable glory!—

We speak but of the Magnates, we heed none humbler than the highest,

We take no count of sorry scribes, nor waste one thought upon the groundlings;

Our eyes are lifted from the multitude, groping in the dark with candles,

To gaze upon that firmament of praise, the constellated lamps of learning.

Ever-during witnesses of Mind, undisputed evidence of Power,

Goodly volumes, living stones, build up their author's temple;

Though of low estate, his rank is above princes,—though needy, he hath worship of the rich,

When Genius unfurleth on the winds his banner as a mighty leader.

Just in purpose, and self-possessed in soul, lord of many talents,

The mental Croesus goeth forth, rejoicing in his wealth;

Keen and clear perception gloweth on his forehead like a sunbeam,

He readeth men at a glance, and mists roll away before him;

The wise have set him as their captain, the foolish are rebuked at his presence,

The excellent bless him with their prayers, and the wicked praise him by their curses;

His voice, mighty in operation, stirreth up the world as a trumpet,

And kings account it honour to be numbered of his friends.

Rare is the worthiness of authorship: I justify mine office;

Albeit fancies weak as mine credit not the calling.

For it addeth immortality to dying facts, that are ready to vanish away,

Embalming as in amber the poor insects of an hour;

Shedding upon stocks and stones the tender light of interest,

And illumining dark places of the earth, with radiance of classic lustre.

It hath power to make past things present, and availeth for the present in the future,

Delivering thoughts, and words, and deeds, from the outer darkness of oblivion.

Where are the sages and the heroes, giants of old time?—

Where are the mighty kings, that reigned before Agamemnon?—

Alas they lie unwept, unhonoured, hidden in the midnight:

Alas, for they died unchronicled: their memorial perished with them.

Where are the nobles of Nineveh, and mitred rulers of Babylon?

Where are the lords of Edom, and the royal pontiffs of Thebais?

The golden Satrap, and the Tetrarch,—the Hun, and the Druid, and the Celt?

The merchant princes of Phoenicia, and the minds that fashioned Elephanta?

Alas, for the poet hath forgotten them; and lo! they are outcasts of Memory;

Alas, that they are withered leaves, sapless and fallen from the chaplet of fame.

Speak, Etruria, whose bones be these, entombed with costly care,—

Tell out, Herculaneum, the titles that have sounded in those thy palaces,—

Lycian Xanthus, thy citadels are mute, and the honour of their architects hath died;

Copan and Palenque, dreamy ruins in the West, the forest hath swallowed up your sculptures;

Syracuse,—how silent of the past!—Carthage, thou art blotted from remembrance!

Egypt, wondrous shores, ye are buried in the sand-hills of forgetfulness!

Alas,—for in your glorious youth Time himself was young,

And none durst wrestle with that Angel, iron-sinewed bridegroom of Space;

So he flew by, strong upon the wing, nor dropped one failing feather,

Wherewith some hoary scribe might register your honour and renown.

Beyond the broad Atlantic, in the regions of the setting sun,

Ask of the plume-crowned Incas, that ruled in old Peru,—

Ask of grand Caziques, and priests of the pyramids in Mexico,—

Ask of a thousand painted tribes, high nobility of Nature,

Who, once, could roam their own Elysian plains, free, generous, and happy,

Who, now, degraded and in exile, having sold their fatherland for nought,

Sink and are extinguished in the western seas, even as the sun they follow,—

Where is the record of their deeds, their prowess worthy of Achilles,

Nestor's wisdom, the chivalry of Manlius, the native eloquence of Cicero,

The skill of Xenophon, the spirit of Alcibiades, the firmness of a MaccabÆan mother,

Brotherly love that Antigone might envy, the honour and the fortitude of Regulus?

Alas, their glory and their praise have vanished like a summer cloud;

Alas! that they are dead indeed; they are not written down in the Book of the living.

High is the privilege of Authorship: I purify mine office;

Albeit earthy stains pollute it in my hands.

For it is to the world a teacher and a guide, Mentor of that gay Telemachus;

Warning, comforting, and helping,—a lover and friend of Man.

Heaven's almoner, Earth's health, patient minister of goodness,

With kind and zealous pen, the wise religious blesseth:

Nature's worshipper, and neophyte of grace, rich in tender sympathies,

With kindled soul and flashing eye, the poet poureth out his heartful:

Priest of truth, champion of innocence, warder of the gates of praise,

Carefully with sifting search laboureth the pale historian:

Error's enemy, and acolyte of science, firm in sober argument,

The calm philosopher marshalleth his facts, noting on his page their principles.

These pour mercies upon men; and others, little less in honour,

By cheerful wit and graphic tale refreshening the harassed spirit.

But, there be other some beside, buyers and sellers in the temple,

Who shame their high vocation, greedy of inglorious gain;

There be, who fabricating books, heed of them meanly as of merchandise;

And seek nor use, nor truth, nor fame, but sell their minds for lucre:

O false brethren! ye wot indeed the labour, but are witless of the love;

O lying prophets, chilled in soul, unquickened by the life of inspiration!—

And there be, who, frivolous and vain, seek to make others foolish,

Snaring youth by loose sweet song, and age by selfish maxim;

Cleverly heartless, and wittily profane, they swell the river of corruption:

Brilliant satellites of sin,—my soul, be not found among their company.

And there be, who, haters of religion, toil to prove it priestcraft,

Owning none other aim nor hope, but to confound the good:

Woe unto them! for their works shall live; yea, to their utter condemnation:

Woe! for their own handwriting shall testify against them for ever.

Pure is the happiness of Authorship: I glorify mine office;

Albeit lightly having sipped the cup of its lower pleasures.

For it is to feel with a father's heart, when he yearneth on the child of his affections;

To rejoice in a man's own miniature world, gladdened by its rare arrangement.

The poem, is it not a fabric of mind? we love what we create:

That choice and musical order,—how pleasant is the toil of composition!

Yea, when the volume of the universe was blazoned out in beauty by its Author,

God was glad, and blessed His work; for it was very good.

And shall not the image of his Maker be happy in his own mind's doing,

Looking on the structure he hath reared, gratefully with sweet complacence?

Shall not the Minerva of his brain, panoplied and perfect in proportions,

Gladden the soul and give light unto the eyes, of him the travailing parent?

Go to the sculptor, and ask him of his dreams,—wherefore are his nights so moonlit?

Angel faces, and beautiful shapes, fascinate the pale Pygmalion:

Go to the painter, and trace his reveries,—wherefore are his days so sunny?

Choice design, and skilful colouring, charm the flitting hours of Parrhasius:

Even so, walking in his buoyancy, intoxicate with fairy fancies,

The young enthusiast of authorship goeth on his way rejoicing:

Behold,—he is gallantly attended; legions of thrilling thoughts

Throng about the standard of his mind, and call his Will their captain;

Behold,—his court is as a monarch's; ideas, and grand imaginations

Swell, with gorgeous cavalcade, the splendour of his Spiritual State;

Behold,—he is delicately served: for oftentimes, in solitary calmness,

Some mental fair Egeria smileth on her Numa's worship;

Behold,—he is happy; there is gladness in his eye, and his heart is a sealed fountain,

Bounding secretly with joys unseen, and keeping down its ecstasy of pleasure!

Yea: how dignified, and worthy, full of privilege and happiness,

Standeth in majestic independence the self-ennobled Author!

For God hath blessed him with a mind, and cherished it in tenderness and purity,

Hath taught it in the whisperings of wisdom, and added all the riches of content:

Therefore, leaning on his God, a pensioner for soul and body,

His spirit is the subject of none other, calling no man Master.

His hopes are mighty and eternal, scorning small ambitions:

He hideth from the pettiness of praise, and pitieth the feebleness of envy.

If he meet honours, well; it may be his humility to take them:

If he be rebuked, better; his veriest enemy shall teach him.

For the master-mind hath a birthright of eminence; his cradle is an eagle's eyrie:

Need but to wait till his wings are grown, and Genius soareth to the sun:

To creeping things upon the mountain leaveth he the gradual ascent,

Resting his swiftness on the summit only for a higher flight.

Glad in clear good-conscience, lightly doth he look for commendation;

What, if the prophet lacketh honour? for he can spare that praise:

The honest giant careth not to be patted on the back by pigmies;

Flatter greatness, he brooketh it good-humouredly: blame him,—thou tiltest at a pyramid:

Yet, just censure of the good never can he hear without contrition;

Neither would he miss one wise man's praise, for scarce is that jewel and costly:

Only for the herd of common minds, and the vulgar trumpetings of fame,

If aught he heedeth in the matter, his honour is sought in their neglect.

Slender is the marvel, and little is the glory, when round his luscious fruits

The worm and the wasp and the multitude of flies are gathered as to banquet;

Fashion's freak, and the critical sting, and the flood of flatteries he scorneth;

Cheerfully asking of the crowd the favour to forget him:

The while his blooming fruits ripen in richer fragrance,

A feast for the few,—and the many yet unborn,—who still shall love their savour.

So then, humbly with his God, and proudly independent of his fellows,

Walketh, in pleasures multitudinous, the man ennobled by his pen:

He hath built up, glorious architect, a monument more durable than brass;

His children's children shall talk of him in love, and teach their sons his honour:

His dignity hath set him among princes, the universe is debtor to his worth,

His privilege is blessing for ever, his happiness shineth now,

For he standeth of that grand Election, each man one among a thousand,

Whose sound is gone out into all lands, and their words to the end of the world!

OF MYSTERY.

All things being are in mystery; we expound mysteries by mysteries;

And yet the secret of them all is one in simple grandeur:

All intricate, yet each path plain, to those who know the way;

All unapproachable, yet easy of access, to them that hold the key:

We walk among labyrinths of wonder, but thread the mazes with a clue;

We sail in chartless seas, but behold! the pole-star is above us.

For, counting down from God's good will, thou meltest every riddle into Him,

The axiom of reason is an undiscovered God, and all things live in His ubiquity:

There is only one great secret; but that one hideth everywhere;

How should the infinite be understood in Time, when it stretcheth on ungrasped for ever?

Can a halting Œdipus of earth guess that enigma of the universe?

Not one: the sword of faith must cut the Gordian knot of nature.

God, pervading all, is in all things the mystery of each;

The wherefore of its character and essence, the fountain of its virtues and its beauties.

The child asketh of its mother,—Wherefore is the violet so sweet?

The mother answereth her babe,—Darling, God hath willed it.

And sages, diving into science, have but a profundity of words;

They track for some few links the circling chain of consequence,

And then, after doubts and disputations, are left where they began,

At the bald conclusion of a clown, things are because they are.

Wherefore are the meadows green, is it not to gratify the eye?

But why should greenness charm the eye? such is God's good will.

Wherefore is the ear attuned to a pleasure in musical sounds,

And who set a number to those sounds, and fixed the laws of harmony?

Who taught the bird to build its nest, or lent the shrub its life,

Or poised in the balances of order the power to attract and to repel?

Who continueth the worlds, and the sea, and the heart, in motion?

Who commanded gravitation to tie down all upon its sphere?—

For, even as a limestone cliff is an aggregate of countless shells,

One riddle concrete of many, a mystery compact of mysteries,

So God, cloud-capped in immensity, standeth the cohesion of all things,

And secrets, sublimely indistinct, permeate that Universe, Himself;

As is the whole, so are the parts, whether they be mighty or minute,

The sun is not more unexplained than the tissue of an emmet's wing.

Thus then, omnipresent Deity worketh His unbiassed mind,

A mind, one in moral, but infinitely multiplied in means:

And the uniform prudence of His will cometh to be counted law,

Till mutable man fancieth volition stirring in the potter's clay:

God, a wise father, showeth not His reasons to His babes;

But willeth in secresy and goodness: for causes generate dispute:

Then we, His darkling children, watch that invariable purpose,

And invest the passive creature with its Maker's energy and skill:

Therefore, they of old time stopped short of God in idols,

Therefore, in these latter days, we heed not the Jehovah in His works.

Mystery is God's great name; He is the mystery of goodness:

Some other, from the hierarchs of heaven, usurped the mystery of sin.

God is the King, yea even of Himself; He crowned Himself with holiness;

The burning circlet of iniquity another found and wore.

God is separate, even from His attributes; but He willed eternally the good;

Therefore freely, though unchangeably, is wise, righteous, and loving:

But ambition, open unto angels, saw the evil, flung aside from the beginning,

It was Lucifer that saw, and nothing loathed those black unclaimed regalia,

So he coveted and stole, to be counted for a king, antagonist of God,

But when he touched the leprous robes, behold! a cheated traitor.

For self-existence, charactered with love, with power, wisdom, and ubiquity,

Could not dwell alone, but willed and worked creation.

Thus, in continual exhalation, darkening the void with matter,

Sprang from prolific Deity the creatures of His skill.

And beings living on His breath, were needfully less perfect than Himself,

Therefore less capable of bliss, whereat His benevolence was bounded;

So, to make the capability expand, intensely progressive to eternity,

He suffered darkness to illustrate the light, and pain to heighten pleasure:

To heap up happiness on souls He loved, allowed He sin and sorrow,

And then to guilt and grief and shame, He brought unbidden amnesty:

Sinless, none had been redeemed, nor wrapt again in God:

Sorrowless, no conflict had been known, and Heaven had been mulcted of its comfort:

Yea, with evil unexhibited, probationary toils unfelt,

Men had not appreciated good, nor angels valued their security.

Herein, to reason's eye, is revealed the mystery of goodness,

Blessing through permitted woe, and teaching by the mystery of sin.

O Christian, whose chastened curiosity loveth things mysterious,

Accounting them shadows and eclipses of Him the one great light,

Look now, satisfied with faith, on minds that judge by sense,

And, dull from contemplating matter, take small heed of spirit.

Toiling feebly upward, their argument tracketh from below,

They catch the latest consequent, and prove the nearest cause:

What is this? that a seed produced a seed, and so for a thousand seasons;

Ascend a thousand steps, thy ladder leaveth thee in air:

Thou canst not climb to God, and short of Him is nothing;

There is no cause for aught we see, but in His present will.

Begin from the Maker, thou carriest down His attributes to reptiles,

The sharded beetle and the lizard live and move in Him:

Begin from the creature, corruption and infirmity mar thy foolish toil,

Heap Ossa on Olympus, how much art thou nearer to the stars?

It is easy running from a mountain's top down to the valleys at its foot,

But difficult and steep the laborious ascent, and feebly shalt thou reach it:

Yet man, beginning from himself, that first deluding mystery,

Hopeth from the pit of lies to struggle up to truth;

So, taxing knowledge to its strength, he pusheth one step further,

And fancieth complacently that much is done by reaching a remote effect:

Then he maketh answer to himself, as a silly nurse to her little one,

Evading, in a mist of words, hard things he cannot solve;

Till, like an ostrich in the desert, he burieth his head in atoms,

Thinking that, if he is blind, no sun can shine in heaven.

Therefore cometh it to pass, that an atheist is ever the most credulous,

Snatching at any foolish cause, that may dispel his doubts;

And, even as it were for ridicule, a spectacle for men and angels,

The captious and cautious unbeliever is of all men weakest to believe:

Cut from the anchorage of God, his bark is a plaything of the billows;

The compass of his principle is broken, the rudder of his faith unshipped:

Chance and Fate, in a stultified antagonism, govern all for him;

Truth sprang from the conflict of falsities, and the multitude of accidents hath bred design!

Where is the imposture so gross, that shall not entrap his curiosity?

What superstition is so abject, that it doth not blanch his cheek?

Whereof can he be sure, with whom Chaos is substitute for Order?

How should his silly structure stand, a pyramid built upon its apex?—

Yea, I have seen grey-headed men, the bastard slips of science,

Go for light to glow-worms, while they scorn the sun at noon:

Men, who fear no God, trembling at a gipsy's curse,

Men, who jest at revelation, clinging to a madman's prophecy!

There is a pleasing dread in the fashion of all mysteries,

For hope is mixed therein and fear; who shall divine their issues?

Even the orphan, wandering by night, lost on dreary moors,

Is sensible of some vague bliss amidst his shapeless terrors;

The buoyancy of instant expectation, spurring on the mind to venture,

Overbeareth, in its energy, the cramp and the chill of apprehension.

There is a solitary pride, when the heart, in new importance,

Writeth gladly on its archives, the secrets none other men have seen:

And there is a caged terror, evermore wrestling with the mind,

When crime hath whispered his confession, and the secrets are written there in blood:

The village maiden is elated at the tenderly confided tale:

The bandit's wife with sickening fear guessed the premeditated murder:

The sage, with triumph on his brow, hideth up his deep discovery;

The idlest clown shall delve all day, to find a hidden treasure.

For mystery is man's life; we wake to the whisperings of novelty:

And what, though we lie down disappointed? we sleep, to wake in hope.

The letter, or the news, the chances and the changes, matters that may happen,

Sweeten or embitter daily life with the honey-gall of mystery.

For we walk blindfold,—and a minute may be much,—a step may reach the precipice;

What earthly loss, what heavenly gain, may not this day produce?

Levelled of Alps and Andes, without its valleys and ravines,

How dull the face of earth, unfeatured of both beauty and sublimity:

And so, shorn of mystery, beggared in its hopes and fears,

How flat the prospect of existence, mapped by intuitive foreknowledge.

Praise God, creature of earth, for the mercies linked with secresy,

That spices of uncertainty enrich the cup of life;

Praise God, His hosts on high, for the mysteries that make all joy;

What were intelligence with nothing more to learn, or heaven, in eternity of sameness?

To number every mystery were to sum the sum of all things:

None can exhaust a theme, whereof God is example and similitude.

Nevertheless, take a garland from the garden, a handful from the harvest,

Some scattered drops of spray from the ceaseless mighty cataract.

Whence are we,—whither do we tend,—how do we feel, and reason?

How strange a thing is man, a spirit saturating clay!

When doth soul make embryos immortal,—how do they rank hereafter,—

And will the unconscious idiot be quenched in death as nothing?

In essence immaterial, are these minds, as it were, thinking machines?

For, to understand may but rightly be to use a mechanism all possess,

So that in reading or hearing of another, a man shall seem unto himself

To be recollecting images or arguments, native and congenial to his mind:

And yet, what shall we say,—who can arede the riddle?

The brain may be clockwork, and mind its spring, mechanism quickened by a spirit.

Who so shrewd as rightly to divide life, instinct, reason;

Trees, zoophytes, creatures of the plain, and savage men among them?

Hath the mimosa instinct,—or the scallop more than life,—

Or the dog less than reason,—or the brute-man more than instinct?

What is the cause of health,—and the gendering of disease?

Why should arsenic kill, and whence is the potency of antidotes?

Behold, a morsel,—eat and die; the term of thy probation is expired:

Behold, a potion,—drink and be alive; the limit of thy trial is enlarged.

Who can expound beauty? or explain the character of nations?

Who will furnish a cause for the epidemic force of fashion?

Is there a moral magnetism living in the light of example?

Is practice electricity?—Yet all these are but names.

Doth normal Art imprison, in its works, spirit translated into substance,

So that the statue, the picture, or the poem, are crystals of the mind?

And doth Philosophy with sublimating skill shred away the matter,

Till rarefied intelligence exudeth even out of stocks and stones?

O Mysteries, ye all are one, the mind of an inexplicable Architect

Dwelleth alike in each, quickening and moving in them all.

Fields, and forests, and cities of men, their woes and wealth and works,

And customs, and contrivances of life, with all we see and know,

For a little way, a little while, ye hang dependent on each other,

But all are held in one right-hand, and by His will ye are.

Here is an answer unto mystery, an unintelligible God,

This is the end and the beginning, it is reason that He be not understood.

Therefore it were probable and just, even to a man's weak thinking,

To have one for God who always may be learnt, yet never fully known:

That He, from whom all mysteries spring, in whom they all converge,

Throned in His sublimity beyond the grovellings of lower intellect,

Should claim to be truer than man's truest, the boasted certainty of numbers,

Should baffle his arithmetic, confound his demonstrations, and paralyse the might of his necessity,

Standing supreme as the mystery of mysteries, everywhere, yet impersonate,

Essential One in three, essential Three in one!

OF GIFTS.

I had a seeming friend;—I gave him gifts, and he was gone:

I had an open enemy;—I gave him gifts, and won him:

Common friendship standeth on equalities, and cannot bear a debt;

But the very heart of hate melteth at a good man's love:

Go to, then, thou that sayest,—I will give and rivet the links:

For pride shall kick at obligation, and push the giver from him.

The covetous spirit may rejoice, revelling in thy largess,

But chilling selfishness will mutter,—I must give again:

The vain heart may be glad, in this new proof of man's esteem,

But the same idolatry of self abhorreth thoughts of thanking.

Nevertheless, give; for it shall be a discriminating test

Separating honesty from falsehood, weeding insincerity from friendship.

Give, it is like God; thou weariest the bad with benefits:

Give, it is like God; thou gladdenest the good by gratitude.

Give to thy near of kin, for providence hath stationed thee his helper:

Yet see that he claim not, as his right, thy freewill offering of duty.

Give to the young, they love it; neither hath the poison of suspicion

Spoilt the flavour of their thanks, to look for latent motives.

Give to merit, largely give; his conscious heart will bless thee:

It is not flattery, but love,—the sympathy of men his brethren.

Give, for encouragement in good; the weak desponding mind

Hath many foes, and much to do, and leaneth on its friends.

Yet heed thou wisely these; give seldom to thy better;

For such obtrusive boon shall savour of presumption;

Or, if his courteous bearing greet thy proffered kindness,

Shall not thine independent honesty be vexed at the semblance of a bribe?

Moreover, heed thou this; give to thine equal charily,

The occasion fair and fitting, the gift well chosen and desired:

Hath he been prosperous and blest? a flower may show thy gladness;

Is he in need? with liberal love, tender him the well-filled purse:

Disease shall welcome friendly care in grapes and precious unguents;

And where a darling child hath died, give praise, and hope, and sympathy.

Yet once more, heed thou this; give to the poor discreetly,

Nor suffer idle sloth to lean upon thy charitable arm:

To diligence give, as to an equal, on just and fit occasion;

Or he bartereth his hard-earned self-reliance for the casual lottery of gifts.

The timely loan hath added nerve, where easy liberality would palsy;

Work and wages make a light heart; but the mendicant asked with a heavy spirit.

A man's own self-respect is worth unto him more than money,

And evil is the charity that humbleth, and maketh man less happy.

There are who sow liberalities, to reap the like again;

But men accept his boon, scorning the shallow usurer:

I have known many such a fisherman lose his golden baits:

And oftentimes the tame decoy escapeth with the flock.

Yea, there are who give unto the poor, to gain large interest of God,—

Fool,—to think His wealth is money, and not mind:

And haply after thine alms, thy calculated givings,

The hurricane shall blast thy crops, and sink the homeward ship;

Then shall thy worldly soul murmur that the balances were false,

Thy trader's mind shall think of God,—He stood not to His bargain!

Give, saith the preacher, be large in liberality, yield to the holy impulse,

Tarry not for cold consideration, but cheerfully and freely scatter.

So, for complacency of conscience, in a gush of counterfeited charity,

He that hath not wherewith to be just, selfishly presumeth to be generous:

The debtor, and the rich by wrong, are known among the band of the benevolent;

And men extol the noble hearts, who rob that they may give.

Receivers are but little prone to challenge rights of giving,

Nor stop to test, for conscience-sake, the righteousness of mammon:

And the zealot in a cause is a receiver, at the hand which bettereth his cause;

And thus an unsuspected bribe shall blind the good man's judgment:

It is easy to excuse greatness, and the rich are readily forgiven:

What, if his gains were evil, sanctified by using them aright?

O shallow flatterer, self-interest is thy thought,

Hopeless of partaking in the like, thou too wouldst scorn the giver.

Money hath its value; and the scatterer thereof his thanks:

Few men, drinking at a rivulet, stop to consider its source.

The hand that closeth on an alm, be it for necessities or zeal,

Hath small scruple whence it came: Vespasian rejoiceth in his tribute.

Therefore have colleges and hospitals risen upon orphans' wrongs,

Chapels and cathedrals have thriven on the welcome wages of iniquity,

And fraud, in evil compensation, hath salved his guilty conscience,

Not by restoring to the cheated, but by ostentatious giving to the grateful.

So, those who reap rejoice; and reaping, bless the sower:

No one is eager to discover, where discovery tendeth unto loss:

Yet, if knowledge of a theft make gainers thereby guilty,

Can he be altogether innocent, who never asked the honesty of gain?

Therefore, O preacher, zealous for charity, temper thy warm appeal,—

Warning the debtor and unjustly rich, they may not dare to give:

To do good is a privilege and guerdon: how shouldst thou rejoice

If ill-got gifts of presumptuous fraud be offered on the altar?

The question is not of degrees; unhallowed alms are evil;

Discourage and reject alike the obolus or talent of iniquity.

Yet more, be careful that, unworthily, thou gain not an advantage over weakness,

Unstable souls, fervent and profuse, fluttered by the feeling of the moment;

For eloquence swayeth to its will the feeble and the conscious of defect:

Rashly give they, and afterward are sad,—a gift that doubly erred.

It was the worldliness of priestcraft that accounted alms-giving for charity;

And many a father's penitence hath steeped his son in penury;

Yet, considered he lightly the guilt of a death-bed selfishness

That strove to take with him, for gain, the gold no longer his;

So he died in a false peace, and dying robbed his kindred;

The cunning friar at his side having cheated both the living and the dead.

Charity sitteth on a fair hill-top, blessing far and near,

But her garments drop ambrosia, chiefly, on the violets around her:

She gladdeneth indeed the map-like scene, stretching to the verge of the horizon,

For her angel face is lustrous and beloved, even as the moon in heaven:

But the light of that beatific vision gloweth in serener concentration

The nearer to her heart, and nearer to her home,—that hill-top where she sitteth:

Therefore is she kind unto her kin, yearning in affection on her neighbours,

Giving gifts to those around, who know and love her well.

But the counterfeit of charity, an hypocrite of earth, not a grace of heaven,

Seeketh not to bless at home, for her nearer aspect is ill-favoured:

Therefore hideth she for shame, counting that pride humility,

And none of those around her hearth are gladdened by her gifts:

Rather, with an overreaching zeal, flingeth she her bounty to the stranger,

And scattered prodigalities abroad compensate for meanness in her home:

For benefits showered on the distant shine in unmixed beauty,

So that even she may reap their undiscerning praise:

Therefore native want hath pined, where foreign need was fattened;

Woman been crushed by the tyrannous hand that upheld the flag of liberality;

Poverty been prisoned up and starved, by hearts that are maudlin upon crime;

And freeborn babes been manacled by men, who liberate the sturdy slave.

Policy counselleth a gift, given wisely and in season,

And policy afterwards approveth it, for great is the influence of gifts.

The lover, unsmiled upon before, is welcome for his jewelled bauble;

The righteous cause without a fee, must yield to bounteous guilt:

How fair is a man in thine esteem, whose just discrimination seeketh thee,

And so, discerning merit, honoureth it with gifts!

Yea, let the cause appear sufficient, and the motive clear and unsuspicious,

As given to one who cannot help, or proving honest thanks,

There liveth not one among a million, who is proof against the charm of liberality,

And flattery, that boon of praise, hath power with the wisest.

Man is of three natures, craving all for charity;

It is not enough to give him meats, withholding other comfort:

For the mind starveth, and the soul is scorned, and so the human animal

Eateth his unsatisfying pittance, a thankless heartless pauper:

Yet would he bless thee and be grateful, didst thou feed his spirit,

And teach him that thine alms-givings are charities, are loves:

—I saw a beggar in the street, and another beggar pitied him;

Sympathy sank into his soul, and the pitied one felt happier:

Anon passed by a cavalcade, children of wealth and gaiety;

They laughed, and looked upon the beggar, and the gallants flung him gold;

He, poor spirit-humbled wretch, gathered up their givings with a curse,

And went—to share it with his brother, the beggar who had pitied him!

OF BEAUTY.

Thou mightier than Manoah's son, whence is thy great strength,

And wherein the secret of thy craft, O charmer charming wisely?—

For thou art strong in weakness, and in artlessness well skilled,

Constant in the multitude of change, and simple amidst intricate complexity.

Folly's shallow lip can ask the deepest question,

And many wise in many words should answer, what is beauty?—

Who shall separate the hues that flicker on a dying dolphin,

Or analyse the jewelled lights that deck the peacock's train,

Or shrewdly mix upon a palette the tints of an iridescent spar,

Or set in rank the wandering shades about a watered silk?

For beauty is intangible, vague, ill to be defined;

She hath the coat of a chameleon, changing while we watch it.

Strangely woven is the web, disorderly yet harmonious,

A glistering robe of mingled mesh, that may not be unravelled.

It is shot with heaven's blue, the soul of summer skies,

And twisted strings of light, the mind of noonday suns,

And ruddy gleams of life, that roll along the veins,

A coat of many colours, running curiously together.

There is threefold beauty for man; twofold beauty for the animal;

And the beauty of inanimates is single: body, temper, spirit.

Multiplied in endless combination, issue the changeable results;

Each class verging on the other twain, with imperceptible gradation;

And every individual in each having his propriety of difference,

So that the meanest of creation bringeth in a tribute of the beautiful.

Yea, from the worst in favour shineth out a fitness of design,

The patent mark of beauty, its Maker's name imprest.

For the great Creator's seal is set to all His works;

Its quarterings are Attributes of praise, and all the shield is Beauty:

So, that heraldic blazon is Creation's common signet;

And the universal family of life goeth in the colours of its Lord:

But each one, as a several son, shall bear those arms with a difference;

Beauty, various in phase, and similar in seeming oppositions.

The coins of old Rome were struck with a diversity for each,

Barely two be found alike, in every CÆsar's image:

So, note thou the seals, ranged round the charters of the Universe,

The finger of God is the stamp upon them all, but each hath its separate variety.

Beauty, theme of innocence, how may guilt discourse thee?

Let holy angels sing thy praise, for man hath marred thy visage.

Still the maimed torso of a Theseus can gladden taste with its proportions;

Though sin hath shattered every limb, how comely are the fragments!

And music leaveth on the ear a memory of sweet sounds;

And broken arches charm the sight with hints of fair completeness.

So, while humbled at the ruin, be thou grateful for the relics;

Go forth, and look on all around with kind uncaptious eye:

Freely let us wander through these unfrequented ways,

And talk of glorious beauty, filling all the world.

For beauty hideth everywhere, that Reason's child may seek her,

And having found the gem of price, may set it in God's crown.

Beauty nestleth in the rosebud, or walketh the firmament with planets,

She is heard in the beetle's evening hymn, and shouteth in the matins of the sun;

The cheek of the peach is glowing with her smile, her splendour blazeth in the lightning,

She is the dryad of the woods, the naiad of the streams;

Her golden hair hath tapestried the silkworm's silent chamber,

And to her measured harmonies the wild waves beat in time;

With tinkling feet at eventide she danceth in the meadow,

Or, like a Titan, lieth stretched athwart the ridgy Alps;

She is rising, in her veil of mist, a Venus from the waters,—

Men gaze upon the loveliness,—and lo, it is beautiful exceedingly;

She, with the might of a Briareus, is dragging down the clouds upon the mountain,—

Men look upon the grandeur,—and lo, it is excellent in glory.

For I judge that beauty and sublimity be but the lesser and the great,

Sublime, as magnified to giants, and beautiful, diminished into fairies.

It were a false fancy to solve all beauty by desire,

It were a lowering thought to expound sublimity by dread.

Cowardly men with trembling hearts have feared the furious storm,

Nor felt its thrilling beauty; but is it then not beautiful?

And careless men, at summer's eve, have loved the dimpled waves;

O that smile upon the seas,—hath it no sublimity?

Dost thou nothing know of this,—to be awed at woman's beauty?

Nor, with exhilarated heart, to hail the crashing thunder?

Thou hast much to learn, that never found a fearfulness in flowers;

Thou hast missed of joy, that never basked in beauties of the terrible.

Show me an enthusiast in aught; he hath noted one thing narrowly,

And lo, his keenness hath detected the one dear hiding place of beauty:

Then he boasteth, simple soul, flattered by discovery,

Fancying that no science else can show so fair and precious:

He hath found a ray of light, and cherisheth the treasure in his closet,

Mocking at those larger minds, that bathe in floods of noon;

Lo, what a jewel hath he gotten,—this is the monopolist of beauty,—

And lightly heeding all beside, he poured his yearnings thitherward:

Be it for love, or for learning, habit, art, or nature,

Exclusive thought is all the cause of this particular zeal.

But like intensity of fitness, kind and skilful beauty,

So pleasant to his mind in one thing, filleth all beside:

From the waking minute of a chrysalis, to the perfect cycle of chronology,

From the centipede's jointed armour to the mammoth's fossil ribs,

From the kingfisher's shrill note, to the cataract's thundering bass,

From the greensward's grateful hues, to the fascinating eye of woman,

Beauty, various in all things, setteth up her home in each,

Shedding graciously around an omnipresent smile.

There is beauty in the rolling clouds, and placid shingle beach,

In feathery snows, and whistling winds, and dun electric skies;

There is beauty in the rounded woods, dank with heavy foliage,

In laughing fields, and dinted hills, the valley and its lake;

There is beauty in the gullies, beauty on the cliffs, beauty in sun and shade,

In rocks and rivers, seas and plains,—the earth is drowned in beauty.

Beauty coileth with the watersnake, and is cradled in the shrewmouse's nest,

She flitteth out with evening bats, and the soft mole hid her in his tunnel;

The limpet is encamped upon the shore, and beauty not a stranger to his tent;

The silvery dace and golden carp thread the rushes with her:

She saileth into clouds with an eagle, she fluttereth into tulips with a humming bird;

The pasturing kine are of her company, and she prowleth with the leopard in his jungle.

Moreover, for the reasonable world, its words, and acts, and speculations,

For frail and fallen manhood, in his every work and way,

Beauty, wrecked and stricken, lingereth still among us,

And morsels of that shattered sun are dropt upon the darkness.

Yea, with savages and boors, the mean, the cruel, and besotted,

Ever in extenuating grace hide some relics of the beautiful.

Gleams of kindness, deeds of courage, patience, justice, generosity,

Truth welcomed, knowledge prized, rebukes taken with contrition,

All, in various measure, have been blest with some of these,

And never yet hath lived the man, utterly beggared of the beautiful.

Beauty is as crystal in the torchlight, sparkling on the poet's page;

Virgin honey of Hymettus, distilled from the lips of the orator;

A savour of sweet spikenard, anointing the hands of liberality;

A feast of angels' food set upon the tables of religion.

She is seen in the tear of sorrow, and heard in the exuberance of mirth;

She goeth out early with the huntsman, and watcheth at the pillow of disease.

Science in his secret laws hath found out latent beauty,

Sphere and square, and cone and curve, are fashioned by her rules:

Mechanism met her in his forces, fancy caught her in its flittings,

Day is lightened by her eyes, and her eyelids close upon the night.

Beauty is dependence in the babe, a toothless tender nurseling;

Beauty is boldness in the boy, a curly rosy truant;

Beauty is modesty and grace in fair retiring girlhood;

Beauty is openness and strength in pure high-minded youth:

Man, the noble and intelligent, gladdeneth earth with beauty,

And woman's beauty sunneth him, as with a smile from heaven.

There is none enchantment against beauty, Magician for all time,

Whose potent spells of sympathy have charmed the passive world:

Verily, she reigneth a Semiramis; there is no might against her;

The lords of every land are harnessed to her triumph.

Beauty is conqueror of all, nor ever yet was found among the nations

That iron-moulded mind, full proof against her power.

Beauty, like a summer's day, subdueth by sweet influences;

Who can wrestle against Sleep?—yet is that giant, very gentleness.

Ajax may rout a phalanx, but beauty shall enslave him single-handed;

Pericles ruled Athens, yet he is the servant of Aspasia:

Light were the labour, and often-told the tale, to count the victories of beauty,—

Helen, and Judith, and Omphale, and Thais, many a trophied name.

At a glance the misanthrope was softened, and repented of his vows,

When Beauty asked, he gave, and banned her—with a blessing;

The cold ascetic loved the smile that lit his dismal cell,

And kindly stayed her step, and wept when she departed;

The bigot abbess felt her heart gush with a mother's feeling,

When looking on some lovely face beneath the cloister's shade;

Usury freed her without ransom; the buccaneer was gentle in her presence;

Madness kissed her on the cheek, and Idiotcy brightened at her coming:

Yea, the very cattle in the field, and hungry prowlers of the forest

With fawning homage greeted her, as Beauty glided by.

A welcome guest unbidden, she is dear to every hearth;

A glad spontaneous growth of friends is springing round her rest:

Learning sitteth at her feet, and Idleness laboureth to please her,

Folly hath flung aside his bells, and leaden Dulness gloweth;

Prudence is rash in her defence; Frugality filleth her with riches;

Despair came to her for counsel; and Bereavement was glad when she consoled;

Justice putteth up his sword at the tear of supplicating beauty,

And Mercy, with indulgent haste, hath pardoned beauty's sin.

For beauty is the substitute for all things, satisfying every absence,

The rich delirious cup to make all else forgotten:

She also is the zest unto all things, enhancing every presence,

The rare and precious ambergris, to quicken each perfume.

O beauty, thou art eloquent; yea, though slow of tongue,

Thy breast, fair Phryne, pleaded well before the dazzled judge:

O beauty, thou art wise; yea, though teaching falsely,

Sages listen, sweet Corinna, to commend thy lips;

O beauty, thou art ruler; yea, though lowly as a slave,

Myrrha, that imperial brow is monarch of thy lord;

O beauty, thou art winner; yea, though halting in the race,

Hippodame, Camilla, Atalanta,—in gracefulness ye fascinate your umpires;

O beauty, thou art rich; yea, though clad in russet,

Attalus cannot boast his gold against the wealth of beauty;

O beauty, thou art noble; yea, though Esther be an exile,

Set her up on high, ye kings, and bow before the majesty of beauty!

Friend and scholar, who, in charity, hast walked with me thus far,

We have wandered in a wilderness of sweets, tracking beauty's footsteps:

And ever as we rambled on among the tangled thicket,

Many a startled thought hath tempted further roaming:

Passion, sympathetic influence, might of imaginary haloes,—

Many the like would lure aside, to hunt their wayward themes.

And, look you!—from his ferny bed in yonder hazel coppice,

A dappled hart hath flung aside the boughs and broke away;

He is fleet and capricious as the zephyr, and with exulting bounds

Hieth down a turfy lane between the sounding woods;

His neck is garlanded with flowers, his antlers hung with chaplets,

And rainbow-coloured ribbons stream adown his mottled flanks:

Should we follow?—foolish hunters, thus to chase afoot,—

Who can track the airy speed and doubling wiles of Taste?

For the estimates of human beauty, dependent upon time and clime,

Manifold and changeable, are multiplied the more by strange gregarious fashion:

And notable ensamples in the great turn to epidemics in the lower,

So that a nation's taste shall vary with its rulers.

Stern Egypt, humbled to the Greek, fancied softer idols;

Greece, the Roman province, nigh forgat her classic sculpture;

Rome, crushed beneath the Goth, loved his barbarian habits;

And Alaric, with his ruffian horde, is tamed by silken Rome.

Columbia's flattened head, and China's crumpled feet,—

The civilized tapering waist,—and the pendulous ears of the savage,—

The swollen throat among the mountains, and an ebon skin beneath the tropics,—

These shall all be reckoned beauty: and for weighty cause.

First, for the latter: Providence in mercy tempereth taste by circumstance,

So that Nature's must shall hit her creature's liking;

Second, for the middle: though the foolishness of vanity seek to mar proportion,

Still, defects in those we love shall soon be counted praise;

Third, for the first: a chief, and a princess, maimed or distorted from the cradle

Shall coax the flattery of slaves to imitate the great in their deformity:

Hence groweth habit: and habits make a taste,

And so shall servile zeal deface the types of beauty.

Whiles Alexander conquered, crookedness was comely:

And followers learn to praise the scars upon their leader's brow.

Youth hath sought to flatter age by mimicking grey hairs;

Age plastereth her wrinkles, and is painted in the ruddiness of Youth.

Fashion, the parasite of Rank, apeth faults and failings,

Until the general Taste depraved hath warped its sense of beauty.

Each man hath a measure for himself, yet all shall coincide in much;

A perfect form of human grace would captivate the world:

Be it manhood's lustre, or the loveliness of woman, all would own its beauty,

The Caffre and Circassian, Russians and Hindoos, the Briton, the Turk and Japanese.

Not all alike, nor all at once, but each in proportion to intelligence,

His purer state in morals, and a lesser grade in guilt:

For the high standard of the beautiful is fixed in Reason's forum,

And sins, and customs, and caprice, have failed to break it down:

And reason's standard for the creature pointeth three perfections,

Frame, knowledge, and the feeling heart, well and kindly mingled;

A fair dwelling, furnished wisely, with a gentle tenant in it,—

This is the glory of humanity: thou hast seen it seldom.

There is a beauty for the body; the superficial polish of a statue,

The symmetry of form and feature delicately carved and painted.

How bright in early bloom the Georgian sitteth at her lattice,

How softened off in graceful curves her young and gentle shape:

Those dark eyes, lit by curiosity, flash beneath the lashes,

And still her velvet cheek is dimpled with a smile.

Dost thou count her beautiful?—even as a mere fair figure,

A plastic image, little more,—the outer garb of woman:

Yea,—and thus far it is well; but Reason's hopes are higher,—

Can he sate his soul on a scantling third of beauty?

Yet is this the pleasing trickery, that cheateth half the world,

Nature's wise deceit to make up waste in life;

And few be they that rest uncaught, for many a twig is limed;

Where is the wise among a million, that took not form for beauty?

But watch it well; for vanity and sin, malice, hate, suspicion,

Louring as clouds upon the countenance, will disenchant its charms.

The needful complexity of beauty claimeth mind and soul,

Though many coins of foul alloy pass current for the true:

And albeit fairness in the creature shall often co-exist with excellence,

Yet hath many an angel shape been tenanted by fiends.

A man, spiritually keen, shall detect in surface beauty

Those marring specks of evil which the sensual cannot see;

Therefore is he proof against a face, unlovely to his likings,

And common minds shall scorn the taste, that shrunk from sin's distortion.

There is a beauty for the reason; grandly independent of externals,

It looketh from the windows of the house, shining in the man triumphant.

I have seen the broad blank face of some misshapen dwarf

Lit on a sudden as with glory, the brilliant light of mind:

Who then imagined him deformed? intelligence is blazing on his forehead,

There is empire in his eye, and sweetness on his lip, and his brown cheek glittereth with beauty:

And I have known some Nireus of the camp, a varnished paragon of chamberers,

Fine, elegant, and shapely, moulded as the master-piece of Phidias,—

Such an one, with intellects abased, have I noted crouching to the dwarf,

Whilst his lovers scorn the fool, whose beauty hath departed!

And there is a beauty for the spirit; mind in its perfect flowering,

Fragrant, expanded into soul, full of love and blessed.

Go to some squalid couch, some famishing death-bed of the poor;

He is shrunken, cadaverous, diseased;—there is here no beauty of the body:

Never hath he fed on knowledge, nor drank at the streams of science,

He is of the common herd, illiterate;—there is here no beauty of the reason:

But lo! his filming eye is bright with love from heaven,

In every look it beameth praise, as worshipping with seraphs;

What honeycomb is hived upon his lips, eloquent of gratitude and prayer,—

What triumph shrined serene upon that clammy brow,

What glory flickering transparent under those thin cheeks,—

What beauty in his face!—Is it not the face of an angel?

Now, of these three, infinitely mingled and combined,

Consisteth human beauty, in all the marvels of its mightiness:

And forth from human beauty springeth the intensity of Love;

Feeling, thought, desire, the three deep fountains of affection.

Son of Adam, or daughter of Eve, art thou trapped by nature,

And is thy young eye dazzled with the pleasant form of beauty?

This is but a lower love; still it hath its honour;

What God hath made and meant to charm, let not man despise.

Nevertheless, as reason's child, look thou wisely farther,

For age, disease, and care, and sin, shall tarnish all the surface:

Reach a loftier love: be lured by the comeliness of mind,—

Gentle, kind, and calm, or lustrous in the livery of knowledge.

And more, there is a higher grade; force the mind to its perfection—

Win those golden trophies of consummate love:

Add unto riches of the reason, and a beauty moulded to thy liking,

The precious things of nobler grace that well adorn a soul;

Thus, be thou owner of a treasure, great in earth and heaven,

Beauty, wisdom, goodness, in a creature like its God.

So then, draw we to an end; with feeble step and faltering,

I follow beauty through the universe, and find her home Ubiquity:

In all that God hath made, in all that man hath marred,

Lingereth beauty, or its wreck, a broken mould and castings.

And now, having wandered long time, freely and with desultory feet,

To gather in the garden of the world a few fair sample flowers,

With patient scrutinizing care let us cull the conclusion of their essence,

And answer to the riddle of Zorobabel, Whence the might of beauty?

Ugliness is native unto nothing, but an attribute of concrete evil;

In everything created, at its worst, lurk the dregs of loveliness:

We be fallen into utter depths, yet once we stood sublime,

For man was made in perfect praise, his Maker's comely image:

And so his new-born ill is spiced with older good,

He carrieth with him, yea to crime, the withered limbs of beauty.

Passions may be crooked generosities; the robber stealeth for his children;

Murder was avenger of the innocent, or wiped out shame with blood.

Many virtues, weighted by excess, sink among the vices;

Many vices, amicably buoyed, float among the virtues.

For, albeit sin is hate, a foul and bitter turpitude,

As hurling back against the Giver all His gifts with insult,

Still when concrete in the sinner, it will seem to partake of his attractions,

And in seductive masquerade shall cloak its leprous skin;

His broken lights of beauty shall illumine its utter black,

And those refracted rays glitter on the hunch of its deformity.

Verily the fancy may be false, yet hath it met me in my musings,

(As expounding the pleasantness of pleasure, but no ways extenuating licence,)

That even those yearnings after beauty, in wayward wanton youth,

When, guileless of ulterior end, it craveth but to look upon the lovely,

Seem like struggles of the soul, dimly remembering pre-existence,

And feeling in its blindness for a long-lost god, to satisfy its longing;

As if the sucking babe, tenderly mindful of his mother,

Should pull a dragon's dugs, and drain the teats of poison.

Our primal source was beauty, and we pant for it ever and again;

But sin hath stopped the way with thorns; we turn aside, wander, and are lost.

God, the undiluted good, is root and stock of beauty,

And every child of reason drew his essence from that stem.

Therefore, it is of intuition, an innate hankering for home,

A sweet returning to the well, from which our spirit flowed,

That we, unconscious of a cause, should bask these darkened souls

In some poor relics of the light that blazed in primal beauty,

And, even like as exiles of idolatry, should quaff from the cisterns of creation

Stagnant draughts, for those fresh springs that rise in the Creator.

Only, being burdened with the body, spiritual appetite is warped,

And sensual man, with taste corrupted, drinketh of pollutions:

Impulse is left, but indiscriminate; his hunger feasteth upon carrion;

His natural love of beauty doateth over beauty in decay.

He still thirsteth for the beautiful; but his delicate ideal hath grown gross,

And the very sense of thirst hath been fevered from affection into passion.

He remembereth the blessedness of light, but it is with an old man's memory,

A blind old man from infancy, that once hath seen the sun,

Whom long experience of night hath darkened in his cradle recollections,

Until his brightest thought of noon is but a shade of black.

This then is thy charm, O beauty all pervading;

And this thy wondrous strength, O beauty, conqueror of all:

The outline of our shadowy best, the pure and comely creature,

That winneth on the conscience with a saddening admiration:

And some untutored thirst for God, the root of every pleasure,

Native to creatures, yea in ruin, and dating from the birthday of the soul.

For God sealeth up the sum, confirmed exemplar of proportions,

Rich in love, full of wisdom, and perfect in the plenitude of Beauty.

OF FAME.

Blow the trumpet, spread the wing, fling thy scroll upon the sky,

Rouse the slumbering world, O Fame, and fill the sphere with echo!

—Beneath thy blast they wake, and murmurs come hoarsely on the wind,

And flashing eyes and bristling hands proclaim they hear thy message:

Rolling and surging as a sea, that upturned flood of faces

Hasteneth with its million tongues to spread the wondrous tale;

The hum of added voices groweth to the roaring of a cataract,

And rapidly from wave to wave is tossed that exaggerated story,

Until those stunning clamours, gradually diluted in the distance,

Sink ashamed, and shrink afraid of noise, and die away.

Then brooding Silence, forth from his hollow caverns,

Cloaked and cowled, and gliding along, a cold and stealthy shadow,

Once more is mingled with the multitude, whispering as he walketh,

And hushing all their eager ears, to hear some newer Fame.

So all is still again; but nothing of the past hath been forgotten;

A stirring recollection of the trumpet ringeth in the hearts of men:

And each one, either envious or admiring, hath wished the chance were his

To fill as thus the startled world with fame, or fear, or wonder.

This lit thy torch of sacrilege, Ephesian Eratostratus;

This dug thy living grave, Pythagoras, the traveller from HadËs;

For this, dived Empedocles into Etna's fiery whirlpool;

For this, conquerors, regicides, and rebels, have dared their perilous crimes.

In all men, from the monarch to the menial, lurketh lust of fame:

The savage and the sage alike regard their labours proudly:

Yea, in death, the glazing eye is illumined by the hope of reputation,

And the stricken warrior is glad, that his wounds are salved with glory.

For fame is a sweet self-homage, an offering grateful to the idol,

A spiritual nectar for the spiritual thirst, a mental food for mind,

A pregnant evidence to all of an after immaterial existence,

A proof that soul is scatheless, when its dwelling is dissolved.

And the manifold pleasures of fame are sought by the guilty and the good:

Pleasures, various in kind, and spiced to every palate:

The thoughtful loveth fame as an earnest of better immortality,

The industrious and deserving, as a symbol of just appreciation,

The selfish, as a promise of advancement, at least to a man's own kin,

And common minds, as a flattering fact that men have been told of their existence.

There is a blameless love of fame, springing from desire of justice,

When a man hath featly won and fairly claimed his honours:

And then fame cometh as encouragement to the inward consciousness of merit,

Gladdening by the kindliness and thanks, wherewithal his labours are rewarded.

But there is a sordid imitation, a feverish thirst for notoriety,

Waiting upon vanity and sloth, and utterly regardless of deserving:

And then fame cometh as a curse; the fire-damp is gathered in the mine:

The soul is swelled with poisonous air, and a spark of temptation shall explode it.

Idle causes, noised awhile, shall yield most active consequents,

And therefore it were ill upon occasion to scorn the voice of rumour.

Ye have seen the chemist in his art mingle invisible gases;

And lo, the product is a substance, a heavy dark precipitate:

Even so fame, hurtling on the quiet with many meeting tongues,

Can out of nothing bring forth fruits, and blossom on a nourishment of air.

For many have earned honour, and thereby rank and riches,

From false and fleeting tales, some casual mere mistake;

And many have been wrecked upon disgrace, and have struggled with poverty and scorn,

From envious hints and ill reports, the slanders cast on innocence.

Whom may not scandal hit? those shafts are shot at a venture:

Who standeth not in danger of suspicion? that net hath caught the noblest.

CÆsar's wife was spotless, but a martyr to false fame;

And Rumour, in temporary things, is gigantic as a ruin or a remedy:

Many poor and many rich have testified its popular omnipotence,

And many a panic-stricken army hath perished with the host of the Assyrians.

Nevertheless, if opportunity be nought, let a man bide his time;

So the matter be not merchandise nor conquest, fear thou less for character.

If a liar accuseth thee of evil, be not swift to answer;

Yea, rather give him license for awhile; it shall help thine honour afterward:

Never yet was calumny engendered, but good men speedily discerned it,

And innocence hath burst from its injustice, as the green world rolling out of Chaos.

What, though still the wicked scoff,—this also turneth to his praise;

Did ye never hear that censure of the bad is buttress to a good man's glory?

What, if the ignorant still hold out, obstinate in unkind judgment,—

Ignorance and calumny are paired; we affirm by two negations:

Let them stand round about, pushing at the column in a circle,

For all their toil and wasted strength, the foolish do but prop it.

And note thou this; in the secret of their hearts, they feel the taunt is false,

And cannot help but reverence the courage, that walketh amid calumnies unanswering:

He standeth as a gallant chief, unheeding shot or shell;

He trusteth in God his Judge: neither arrows nor the pestilence shall harm him.

A high heart is a sacrifice to Heaven: should it stoop among the creepers in the dust,

To tell them that what God approved, is worthy of their praise?

Never shall it heed the thought; but flaming on in triumph to the skies,

And quite forgetting fame, shall find it added as a trophy.

A great mind is an altar on a hill: should the priest descend from his altitude,

To canvass offerings and worship from dwellers on the plain?

Rather, with majestic perseverance will he minister in solitary grandeur,

Confident the time will come, when pilgrims shall be flocking to the shrine.

For fame is the birthright of genius; and he recketh not how long it be delayed;

The heir need not hasten to his heritage, when he knoweth that his tenure is eternal.

The careless poet of Avon, was he troubled for his fame,

Or the deep-mouthed chronicler of Paradise, heeded he the suffrage of his equals?

MÆonides took no thought, committing all his honours to the future,

And Flaccus, standing on his watch-tower, spied the praise of ages.

Smoking flax will breed a flame, and the flame may illuminate a world;

Where is he who scorned that smoke as foul and murky vapour?

The village stream swelled to a river, and the river was a kingdom's wealth,

Where is he who boasted he could step across that stream?

Such are the beginnings of the famous: little in the judgment of their peers,

The juster verdict of posterity shall fix them in the orbits of the Great.

Therefore dull Zoilus, clamouring ascendant of the hour,

Will soon be fain to hide his hate, and bury up his bitterness for shame:

Therefore mocking Momus, offended at the footsteps of Beauty,

Shall win the prize of his presumption, and be hooted from his throne among the stars.

For, as the shadow of a mountain lengtheneth before the setting sun,

Until that screening Alp have darkened all the canton,—

So, Fame groweth to its great ones; their images loom longer in departing;

But the shadow of mind is light, and earth is filled with its glory.

And thou, student of the truth, commended to the praise of God,

Wouldst thou find applause with men?—seek it not, nor shun it.

Ancient fame is roofed in cedar, and her walls are marble;

Modern fame lodgeth in a hut, a slight and temporary dwelling:

Lay not up the treasures of thy soul within so damp a chamber,

For the moth of detraction shall fret thy robe, and drop its eggs upon thy motive;

Or the rust of disheartening reserve shall spoil the lustre of thy gold,

Until its burnished beauty shall be dim as tarnished brass;

Or thieves, breaking through to steal, shall claim thy jewelled thoughts,

And turn to charge the theft on thee, a pilferer from them!

There is a magnanimity in recklessness of fame, so fame be well deserving,

That rusheth on in fearless might, the conscious sense of merit:

And there is a littleness in jealousy of fame, looking as aware of weakness,

That creepeth cautiously along, afraid that its title will be challenged.

The wild boar, full of beechmast, flingeth him down among the brambles;

Secure in bristly strength, without a watch, he sleepeth:

But the hare, afraid to feed, croucheth in its own soft form;

Wakefully with timid eyes, and quivering ears, he listeneth.

Even so, a giant's might is bound up in the soul of Genius,

His neck is strong with confidence, and he goeth tusked with power:

Sturdily he roameth in the forest, or sunneth him in fen and field,

And scareth from his marshy lair a host of fearful foes.

But there is a mimic Talent, whose safety lieth in its quickness,

A timorous thing of doubling guile, that scarce can face a friend:

This one is captious of reproof, provident to snatch occasion,

Greedy of applause, and vexed to lose one tittle of the glory.

He is a poor warder of his fame, who is ever on the watch to keep it spotless;

Such care argueth debility, a garrison relying on its sentinel.

Passive strength shall scorn excuses, patiently waiting a re-action,

He wotteth well that truth is great, and must prevail at last;

But fretful weakness hasteth to explain, anxiously dreading prejudice,

And ignorant that perishable falsehood dieth as a branch cut off.

Purity of motive and nobility of mind shall rarely condescend

To prove its rights, and prate of wrongs, or evidence its worth to others.

And it shall be small care to the high and happy conscience

What jealous friends, or envious foes, or common fools may judge.

Should the lion turn and rend every snarling jackal,

Or an eagle be stopt in his career to punish the petulance of sparrows?

Should the palm-tree bend his crown to chide the briar at his feet,

Nor kindly help its climbing, if it hope, and be ambitious?

Should the nightingale account it worth her pains to vindicate her music,

Before some sorry finches, that affect to judge of song?

No: many an injustice, many a sneer, and slur,

Is passed aside with noble scorn by lovers of true fame:

For well they wot that glory shall be tinctured good or evil,

By the character of those who give it, as wine is flavoured by the wineskin:

So that worthy fame floweth only from a worthy fountain,

But from an ill-conditioned troop the best report is worthless.

And if the sensibility of genius count his injuries in secret,

Wisely will he hide the pains a hardened herd would mock:

For the great mind well may be sad to note such littleness in brethren,

The while he is comforted and happy in the firmest assurance of desert.

Cease awhile, gentle scholar;—seek other thoughts and themes;

Or dazzling Fame with wildfire light shall lure us on for ever.

For look, all subjects of the mind may range beneath its banner,

And time would fail and patience droop, to count that numerous host.

The mine is deep, and branching wide,—and who can work it out?

Years of thought would leave untold the boundless topic, Fame.

Every matter in the universe is linked in suchwise unto others,

That a deep full treatise upon one thing might reach to the history of all things:

And before some single thesis had been followed out in all its branches,

The wandering thinker would be lost in the pathless forest of existence.

What were the matter or the spirit, that hath no part in Fame?

Where were the fact irrelevant, or the fancy out of place?

For the handling of that mighty theme should stretch from past to future,

Catching up the present on its way, as a traveller burdened with time.

All manner of men, their deeds, hopes, fortunes, and ambitions,

All manner of events and things, climate, circumstance, and custom,

Wealth and war, fear and hope, contentment, jealousy, devotion,

Skill and learning, truth, falsehood, knowledge of things gone and things to come,

Pride and praise, honour and dishonour, warnings, ensamples, emulations,

The excellent in virtues, and the reprobate in vice, with the cloud of indifferent spectators,—

Wave on wave with flooding force throng the shoals of thought,

Filling that immeasurable theme, the height and depth of Fame.

With soul unsatisfied and mind dismayed, my feet have touched the threshold,

Fain to pour these flowers and fruits an offering on that altar:

Lo, how vast the temple,—there are clouds within the dome!

Yet might the huge expanse be filled, with volumes writ on Fame.

OF FLATTERY.

Music is commended of the deaf:—but is that praise despised?

I trow not: with flattered soul the musician heard him gladly.

Beauty is commended of the blind:—but is that compliment misliking?

I trow not: though false and insincere, woman listened greedily.

Vacant Folly talketh high of Learning's deepest reason:

Is she hated for her hollowness?—learning held her wiser for the nonce.

The worldly and the sensual, to gain some end, did homage to religion:

And the good man gave thanks as for a convert, where others saw the hypocrite.

Yet none of these were cheated at the heart, nor steadily believed those flatteries;

They feared the core was rotten, while they hoped the skin was sound:

But the fruits have so sweet fragrance, and are verily so pleasant to the eyes,

It were an ungracious disenchantment to find them apples of Sodom.

So they laboured to think all honest, winking hard with both their eyes;

And hushed up every whisper that could prove that praise absurd:

They willingly regard not the infirmities that make such worship vain,

And palliate to their own fond hearts the faults they will not see.

For the idol rejoiceth in his incense, and loveth not to shame his suppliants,

Should he seek to find them false, his honours die with theirs:

An offering is welcome for its own sake, set aside the giver,

And praise is precious to a man, though uttered by the parrot or the mocking-bird.

The world is full of fools; and sycophancy liveth on the foolish:

So he groweth great and rich, that fawning supple parasite.

Sometimes he boweth like a reed, cringing to the pompousness of pride,

Sometimes he strutteth as a gallant, pampering the fickleness of vanity;

I have known him listen with the humble, enacting silent marveller,

To hear some purse-proud dunce expose his poverty of mind;

I have heard him wrangle with the obstinate, vowing that he will not be convinced,

When some weak youth hath wisely feared the chance of ill success:

Now, he will barely be a winner,—to magnify thy triumphs afterward;

Now, he will hardly be a loser,—but cannot cease to wonder at thy skill:

He laudeth his own worth, that the leader may have glory in his follower;

He meekly confesseth his unworthiness, that the leader may have glory in himself.

Many wiles hath he, and many modes of catching,

But every trap is selfishness, and every bait is praise.

Come, I would forewarn thee and forearm thee; for keen are the weapons of his warfare;

And, while my soul hath scorned him, I have watched his skill from far.

His thoughts are full of guile, deceitfully combining contrarieties,

And when he doeth battle in a man, he is leagued with traitorous Self-love.

Strange things have I noted, and opposite to common fancy;

We leave the open surface, and would plumb the secret depths.

For he will magnify a lover, even to disparaging his mistress;

So much wisdom, goodness, grace,—and all to be enslaved?

Till the Narcissus, self-enamoured, whelmed in floods of flattery,

Is cheated from the constancy and fervency of love by friendship's subtle praise.

Moreover, he will glorify a parent, even to the censure of his child,—

O degenerate scion, of a stock so excellent and noble!

Scant will he be in well-earned praise of a son before his father;

And rarely commendeth to a mother her daughter's budding beauty:

Yet shall he extol the daughter to her father, and be warm about the son before his mother;

Knowing that self-love entereth not, to resist applause with jealousies.

Wisely is he sparing of hyperbole where vehemence of praise would humble,

For many a father liketh ill to be counted second to his son:

And shrewdly the flatterer hath reckoned on a self still lurking in the mother,

When his tongue was slow to speak of graces in the daughter.

But if he descend a generation, to the grandsire his talk is of the grandson,

Because in such high praise he hideth the honours of the son;

And the daughter of a daughter may well exceed, in beauty, love, and learning,

For unconsciously old age perceived—she cannot be my rival.

These are of the deep things of flattery: and many a shallow sycophant

Hath marvelled ill that praise of children seldom won their parents.

This therefore note, unto detection: flattery can sneer as well as smile;

And a master in the craft wotteth well, that his oblique thrust is surest.

Flattery sticketh like a burr, holding to the soil with anchors,

A vital, natural, subtle seed, everywhere hardy and indigenous.

Go to the storehouse of thy memory, and take what is readiest to thy hand,—

The noble deed, the clever phrase, for which thy pride was flattered:

Oh, it hath been dwelt upon in solitude, and comforted thy heart in crowds,

It hath made thee walk as in a dream, and lifted up the head above thy fellows;

It hath compensated months of gloom, that minute of sweet sunshine,

Drying up the pools of apathy, and kindling the fire of ambition:

Yea, the flavour of that spice, mingled in the cup of life,

Shall linger even to the dregs, and still be tasted with a welcome;

The dame shall tell her grandchild of her coy and courted youth,

And the grey-beard prateth of a stranger, who praised his task at school.

Oftimes to the sluggard and the dull, flattery hath done good service,

Quickening the mind to emulation, and encouraging the heart that failed.

Even so, a stimulating poison, wisely tendered by the leech,

Shall speed the pulse, and rally life, and cheat astonished death.

For, as a timid swimmer ventureth afloat with bladders,

Until self-confidence and growth of skill have made him spurn their aid,

Thus commendation may be prudent, where a child hath ill deserved it;

But praise unmerited is flattery, and the cure will bring its cares:

For thy son may find thee out, and thou shalt rue the remedy:

Yea, rather, where thou canst not praise, be honest in rebuke.

I have seen the objects of a flatterer mirrored clearly on the surface,

Where self-love scattereth praise, to gather praise again.

This is a commodity of merchandize, words put out at interest:

A scheme for canvassing opinions, and tinging them all with partiality.

He is but a harmless fool; humour him with pitiful good-nature:

If a poetaster quote thy song, be thou tender to his poem:

Did the painter praise thy sketch? be kind, commend his picture;

He looketh for a like return; then thank him with thy praise.

In these small things with these small minds count thou the sycophant a courtier,

And pay back, as blindly as ye may, the too transparent honour.

Also, where the flattery is delicate, coming unobtrusive and in season,

Though thou be suspicious of its truth, be generous at least to its gentility.

The skilful thief of LacedÆmon had praise before his judges,

And many caitiffs win applause for genius in their callings.

Moreover, his meaning may be kind,—and thou art a debtor to his tongue;

Hasten well to pay the debt, with charity and shrewdness:

He must not think thee caught, nor feel himself discovered,

Nor find thine answering compliment as hollow as his own.

Though he be a smiling enemy, let him heed thee as the fearless and the friendly;

A searching look, a poignant word, may prove thou art aware:

Still, with compassion to the frail, though keen to see his soul,

Let him not fear for thy discretion: see thou keep his secret, and thine own.

However, where the flattery is gross, a falsehood clear and fulsome,

Crush the venomous toad, and spare not for a jewel in its head.

Tell the presumptuous in flattery, that or ever he bespatter thee with praise,

It might be well to stop and ask how little it were worth:

Thou hast not solicited his suffrage,—let him not force thee to refuse it;

Look to it, man, thy fence is foiled,—and thus we spoil the plot.

Self-knowledge goeth armed, girt with many weapons,

But carrieth whips for flattery, to lash it like a slave:

But the dunce in that great science goeth as a greedy tunny,

To gorge both bait and hook, unheeding all but appetite:

He smelleth praise and swalloweth,—yea, though it be palpable and plain,

Say unto him, Folly, thou art Wisdom,—he will bless thee for thy lie.

Flatterer, thou shalt rue thy trade, though it have many present gains;

Those varnished wares may sell apace, yet shall they spoil thy credit.

Thine is the intoxicating cup, which whoso drinketh it shall nauseate:

Thine is trickery and cheating; but deception never pleased for long.

And though while fresh thy fragrance seemed even as the dews of charity,

Yet afterward it fouled thy censer, as with savour of stale smoke.

For the great mind detected thee at once, answering thine emptiness with pity,

He saw thy self-interested zeal, and was not cozened by vain-glory:

And the little mind is bloated with the praise, scorning him who gave it,

A fool shall turn to be thy tyrant, an thou hast dubbed him great:

And the medium mind of common men, loving first thy music,

After, when the harmonies are done, shall feel small comfort in their echoes;

For either he shall know thee false, conscious of contrary deservings,

And, hating thee for falsehood, soon will scorn himself for truth,

Or, if in aught to toilsome merit honest praise be due,

Though for a season, belike, his weakness hath been raptured at thy witching,

Shall he not speedily perceive, to the vexing of his disappointed spirit,

That thine exaggerated tongue hath robbed him of fair fame?

Thou hast paid in forger's coins, and he had earned true money:

For the substance of just praise, thou hast put him off with shadows of the sycophant:

Thou art all things to all men, for ends false and selfish,

Therefore shalt be nothing unto any one, when those thine ends are seen.

Turn aside, young scholar, turn from the song of Flattery!

She hath the Siren's musical voice, to ravish and betray.

Her tongue droppeth honey, but it is the honey of Anticyra;

Her face is a mask of fascination, but there hideth deformity behind;

Her coming is the presence of a queen, heralded by courtesy and beauty,

But, going away, her train is held by the hideous dwarf, Disgust.

Know thyself, thine evil as thy good, and flattery shall not harm thee:

Yea, her speech shall be a warning, a humbling and a guide.

For wherein thou lackest most, there chiefly will the sycophant commend thee,

And then most warmly will congratulate, when a man hath least deserved.

Behold, she is doubly a traitor; and will underrate her victim's best,

That, to the comforting of conscience, she may plead his worse for better.

Therefore, is she dangerous,—as every lie is dangerous:

Believe her tales, and perish: if thou act upon such counsel.

Her aims are thine not thee, thy wealth and not thy welfare,

Thy suffrage not thy safety, thine aid and not thine honour.

Moreover, with those aims insured, ceaseth all her glozing;

She hath used thee as a handle,—but her hand was wise to turn it;

Thus will she glorify her skill, that it deftly caught thy kindness,

Thus will she scorn thy kindness, so pliable and easy to her skill.

And then, the flatterer will turn to be thy foe, the bitterest and hottest,

Because he oweth thee much hate to pay off many humblings.

Thinkest thou now that he is high, he loveth the remembrance of his lowliness,

The servile manner, the dependent smile, the conscience self-abased?

No, this hour is his own, and the flatterer will be found a busy mocker;

He that hath salved thee with his tongue, shall now gnash upon thee with his teeth;

Yea, he will be leader in the laugh,—silly one, to listen to thy loss,

We scarce had hoped to lime and take another of the fools of flattery.

At the last; have charity, young scholar,—yea, to the sycophant convicted;

Be not a Brutus to thyself, nor stern in thine own cause.

Pardon exaggerated praise; for there is a natural impulse,

Spurring on the nobler mind, to colour facts by feelings:

Take an indulgent view of each man's interest in self,

Be large and liberal in excuses; is not that infirmity thine own?

Search thy soul and be humble; and mercy abideth with humility;

So that, yea, the insincere may find thee pitiful, and love thee.

Mildly put aside, without rudeness of repulse, the pampering hand of flattery,

For courtesy and kindness have gone beneath its guise, and ill shouldst thou rebuke them.

Thou art incapable of theft: but flowers in the garden of a friend

Are thine to pluck with confidence, and it were unfriendliness to hesitate:

Thou abhorrest flattery: but a generous excess in praise

Is thine to yield with honest heart, and false were the charity to doubt it:

The difference lieth in thine aim; kindliness and good are of charity,

But selfish, harmful, vile, and bad, is Flattery's evil end.

OF NEGLECT.

Generous and righteous is thy grief, slighted child of sensibility;

For kindliness enkindleth love, but the waters of indifference quench it:

Thy soul is athirst for sympathy, and hungereth to find affection,

The tender scions of thy heart yearn for the sunshine of good feeling;

And it is an evil thing and bitter, when the cheerful face of Charity,

Going forth gaily in the morning to woo the world with smiles,

Is met by those wayfaring men with coldness, suspicion, and repulse,

And turneth into hard dead stone at the Gorgon visage of Neglect.

O brother, warm and young, covetous of other's favour,

I see thee checked and chilled, sorrowing for censure or forgetfulness:

Let coarse and common minds despise—that wounding of thy vanity,

Alas, I note a sorer cause, the blighting of thy love;

Let the callous sensual deride thee,—disappointed of thy praise,

Alas, thou hast a juster grief, defrauded of their kindness:

It is a theme for tears to feel the soft heart hardening,

The frozen breath of apathy sealing up the fountain of affection;

It is a pang, keen only to the best, to be injured well-deserving,

And slumbering Neglect is injury,—Could ye not watch one hour?

When God Himself complained, it was that none regarded,

And indifference bowed to the rebuke, Thou gavest Me no kiss when I came in.

Moreover, praise is good; honour is a treasure to be hoarded;

A good man's praise foreshadoweth God's, and in His smile is heaven:

But men walk on in hardihood, steeling their sinfulness to censure,

And when rebuke is ridiculed, the love of praise were an infirmity;

The judge thou heedest not in fear, cannot have deep homage of thy hope,

And who then is the wise of this world, that will own he trembleth at his fellows?

Calm, careless, and insensible, he mocketh blame or calumny,

Neither should his dignity be humbled to some pittance of their praise:

The rather, let false pride affect to trample on the treasure

Which evermore in secret strength unconquered Nature prizeth;

Rather, shall ye stifle now the rising bliss of triumph,

Lest after, in the world's Neglect, he must acknowledge bitterness.

For lo, that world is wide, a huge and crowded continent,

Its brazen sun is mammon, and its iron soil is care:

A world full of men, where each man clingeth to his idol;

A world full of men, where each man cherisheth his sorrow;

A world full of men, multitude shoaling upon multitude;

A surging sea, where every wave is burdened with an argosy of self;

A boundless beach, where every stone is a separate microscopic world:

A forest of innumerable trees, where every root is independent.

What then is the marvel or the shame, if units be lost among the million?

Canst thou reasonably murmur, if a leaf drop off unnoticed?

Wondrous in architecture, intricate and beautiful, delicately tinged and scented,

Exquisite of feeling and mysterious in life, none cared for its growth, or its decay:

None? yea,—no one of its fellows,—nor cedar, palm, nor bramble,—

None? its twin-born brother scarcely missed it from the spray:

None?—if none indeed, then man's neglect were bitterness;

And Life a land without a sun, a globe without a God!

Yea, flowers in the desert, there be that love your beauty;

Yea, jewels in the sea, there be that prize your brightness;

Children of unmerited oblivion, there be that watch and woo you,

And many tend your sweets, with gentle ministering care:

Thronging spirits of the happy, and the ever-present Good One

Yearning seek those precious things, man hath not heart to love,

Gems of the humblest or the highest, pure and patient in their kind,

The souls unhardened by ill usage, and uncorrupt by luxury.

And ye, poor desolates unsunned, toilers in the dark damp mine,

Wearied daughters of oppression, crushed beneath the car of avarice,

There be that count your tears,—He hath numbered the hairs of thy head,—

There be that can forgive your ill, with kind considerate pity:

Count ye this for comfort, Justice hath her balances,

And yet another world can compensate for all:

The daily martyrdom of patience shall not be wanting of reward;

Duty is a prickly shrub, but its flower will be happiness and glory.

Ye too, the friendless, yet dependent, that find nor home nor lover,

Sad imprisoned hearts, captive to the net of circumstance,—

And ye, too harshly judged, noble unappreciated intellects,

Who, capable of highest, lowlier fix your just ambition in content,—

And chiefest, ye, famished infants of the poor, toiling for your parents' bread,

Tired, and sore, and uncomforted the while, for want of love and learning,

Who struggle with the pitiless machine in dull continuous conflict,

Tasked by iron men, who care for nothing but your labour,—

Be ye long-suffering and courageous: abide the will of Heaven;

God is on your side; all things are tenderly remembered:

His servants here shall help you; and where those fail you through Neglect,

His kingdom still hath time and space for ample discriminative Justice:

Yea, though utterly on this bad earth ye lose both right and mercy,

The tears that we forgat to note, our God shall wipe away.

Nevertheless, kind spirit, susceptible and guileless,

Meek uncherished dove, in a carrion flock of fowls,

Sensitive mimosa, shrinking from the winds that help to root the fir,

Fragile nautilus, shipwrecked in the gale whereat the conch is glad,

Thy sharp peculiar grief is uncomforted by hope of compensation,

For it is a delicate and spiritual wound, which the probe of pity bruiseth:

Yet hear how many thoughts extenuate its pain;

Even while a kindred heart can sorrow for its presence.

For the sting of neglect is in this,—that such as we are all, forget us,

That men and women, kith and kin, so lightly heed of other:

Sympathy is lacking from the guilty such as we, even where angels minister,

And souls of fine accord must prize a fellow-sinner's love;

For the worst love those who love them, and the best claim heart for heart,

And it is a holy thirst to long for love's requital:

Hard it will be, hard and sad, to love and be unloved;

And many a thorn is thrust into the side of him that is forgotten.

The oppressive silence of reserve, the frost of failing friendship,

Affection blighted by repulse, or chilled by shallow courtesy,

The unaided struggle, the unconsidered grief, the unesteemed self-sacrifice,

The gift, dear evidence of kindness, long due, but never offered,

The glance estranged, the letter flung aside, the greeting ill received,

The services of unobtrusive care unthanked, perchance unheeded,

These things, which hard men mock at, rend the feelings of the tender,

For the delicate tissue of a spiritual mind is torn by those sharp barbs;

The coldness of a trusted friend, a plenitude ending in vacuity,

Is as if the stable world had burst a hollow bubble.

But consider, child of sensibility; the lot of men is labour,

Labour for the mouth, or labour in the spirit, labour stern and individual.

Worldly cares and worldly hopes exact the thoughts of all,

And there is a necessary selfishness, rooted in each mortal breast.

The plans of prudence, or the whisperings of pride, or all-absorbing reveries of love,

Ambition, grief, or fear, or joy, set each man for himself;

Therefore, the centre of a circle, whereunto all the universe convergeth,

Is seen in fallen solitude, the naked selfish heart:

Stripped of conventional deceptions, untrammelled from the harness of society,

We all may read one little word engraved on all we do;

Other men, what are they unto us? the age, the mass, the million,—

We segregate, distinct from generalities, that isolated particle, a self:

It is the very law of our life, a law for soul and body,

An earthly law for earthly men, toiling in responsible probation.

For each is the all unto himself, disguise it as we may,

Each infinite, each most precious; yet even as a nothing to his neighbour.

O consider, we be crowding up an avenue, trapped in the decoy of time,

Behind us the irrevocable past, before us the illimitable future:

What wonder is there, if the traveller, wayworn, hopeful, fearful,

Burdened himself, so lightly heed the burden of his brother?

How shouldst thou marvel and be sad, that the pilgrims trouble not to learn thee,

When each hath to master for himself the lessons of life and immortality?

Moreover, what art thou,—so vainly impatient of Neglect,

Where then is thy worthiness, that so thou claimest honour?

Let the true judgment of humility reckon up thine ill deserts,

How little is there to be loved, how much to stir up scorn!

The double heart, the bitter tongue, the rash and erring spirit,

Be these, ye purest among men, your passports unto favour?

It is mercy in the Merciful, and justice in the Just, to be jealous of His creature's love,

But how should evil or duplicity arrogate affection to itself?

Where love is happiness and duty, to be jealous of that love is godlike,

But who can reverence the guilty? who findeth pleasure in the mean?

Check the presumption of thy hopes: thankfully take refuge in obscurity,

Or, if thou claimest merit, thy sin shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.

Yet again: consider them of old, the good, the great, the learned,

Who have blessed the world by wisdom, and glorified their God by purity.

Did those speed in favour? were they the loved and the admired?

Was every prophet had in honour? and every deserving one remembered to his praise?

What shall I say of yonder band, a glorious cloud of witnesses,

The scorned, defamed, insulted,—but the excellent of earth?

It were weariness to count up noble names, neglected in their lives,

Whom none esteemed, nor cared to love, till death had sealed them his.

For good men are the health of the world, valued only when it perisheth,

Like water, light, and air, all precious in their absence.

Who hath considered the blessing of his breath, till the poison of an asthma struck him?

Who hath regarded the just pulses of his heart, till spasm or paralysis have stopped them?

Even thus, an unobserved routine of daily grace and wisdom,

When no more here, had worship of a world, whose penitence atoned for its neglect.

And living genius is seen among infirmities, wherefrom the commoner are free;

And other rival men of mind crowd this arena of contention;

And there be many cares; and a man knoweth little of his brother;

Feebly we appreciate a motive, and slowly keep pace with a feeling:

And social difference is much; and experience teacheth sadly,

How great the treachery of friends, how dangerous the courtesy of enemies.

So, the sum of all these things operateth largely upon all men,

Hedging us about with thorns, to cramp our yearning sympathies,

And we grow materialized in mind, forgetting what we see not,

But, immersed in perceptions of the present, keep things absent out of thought:

Thus, where ingratitude, and guilt, and labour, and selfishness would harden,

Humbly will the good man bow, unmurmuring, to Neglect.

Yet once more, griever at Neglect, hear me to thy comfort, or rebuke:

For, after all thy just complaint, the world is full of love.

O heart of childhood, tender, trusting, and affectionate,

O youth, warm youth, full of generous attentions,

O woman, self-forgetting woman, poetry of human life,

And not less thou, O man, so often the disinterested brother,

Many a smile of love, many a tear of pity,

Many a word of comfort, many a deed of magnanimity,

Many a stream of milk and honey pour ye freely on the earth,

And many a rosebud of love rejoiceth in the dew of your affection.

Neglect? O liberal world, for thine are many prizes:

Neglect? O charitable world, where thousands feed on bounty;

Neglect? O just world, for thy judgments err not often;

Neglect? O libel on a world where half that world is woman!

Where is the afflicted, whose voice, once heard, stirreth not a host of comforters?

Where is the sick untended, or in prison, and they visited him not?

The hungry is fed, and the thirsty satisfied, till ability set limits to the will,

And those who did it unto them, have done it unto God!

For human benevolence is large, though many matters dwarf it,

Prudence, ignorance, imposture, and the straitenings of circumstance and time.

And if to the body, so to the mind, the mass of men are generous;

Their estimate, who know us best, is seldom seen to err;

Be sure the fault is thine, as pride, or shallowness, or vanity,

If all around thee, good and bad, neglect thy seeming merit:

No man yet deserved, who found not some to love him;

And he, that never kept a friend, need only blame himself:

Many for unworthiness will droop and die, but all are not unworthy;

It must indeed be cold clay soil, that killeth every seed.

Therefore, examine thy state, O self-accounted martyr of Neglect,

It may be, thy merit is a cubit, and thy measure thereof a furlong;

But grant it greater than thy thoughts, and grant that men thy fellows,

For pleasure, business, or interest, misuse, forget, neglect thee,—

Still be thou conqueror in this, the consciousness of high deservings;

Let it suffice thee to be worthy; faint not thou for praise;

For that thou art, be grateful; go humbly even in thy confidence;

And set thy foot upon the neck of an enemy so harmless as Neglect.

OF CONTENTMENT.

Godliness with Contentment,—these be the pillars of felicity,

Jachin, wherewithal it is established, and Boaz, in the which is strength;

And upon their capitals is lily-work, the lotus fruit and flower,

Those fair and fragrant types of holiness, innocence, and beauty;

Great gain pertaineth to the pillars, nets and chains of wreathen gold,

And they stand up straight in the temple porch, the house where Glory dwelleth.

The body craveth meats, and the spirit is athirst for peacefulness,

He that hath these, hath enough; for all beyond is vanity.

Surfeit vaulteth over pleasure, to light upon the hither side of pain;

And great store is great care, the rather if it mightily increaseth.

Albeit too little is a trouble, yet too much shall swell into an evil,

If wisdom stand not nigh to moderate the wishes:

For covetousness never had enough, but moaneth at its wants for ever,

And rich men have commonly more need to be taught contentment than the poor.

That hungry chasm in their market-place gapeth still unsatisfied,

Yea, fling in all the wealth of Rome,—it asketh higher victims;

So, when the miser's gold cannot fill the measure of his lust,

Curtius must leap into the pit, and avarice shall close upon his life.

Behold Independence in his rags, all too easily contented,

Careful for nothing, thankful for much, and uncomplaining in his poverty:

Such an one have I somewhile seen earn his crust with gladness;

He is a gatherer of simples, culling wild herbs upon the hills;

And now, as he sitteth on the beach, with his motherless child beside him,

To rest them in the cheerful sun, and sort their mints and horehound,—

Tell me, can ye find upon his forehead the cloud of covetous anxiety,

Or note the dull unkindled eyes of sated sons of pleasure?—

For there is more joy of life with that poor picker of the ditches,

Than among the multitude of wealthy who wed their gains to discontent.

I have seen many rich, burdened with the fear of poverty,

I have seen many poor, buoyed with all the carelessness of wealth:

For the rich had the spirit of a pauper, and the moneyless a liberal heart;

The first enjoyeth not for having, and the latter hath nothing but enjoyment.

None is poor but the mean in mind, the timorous, the weak, and unbelieving;

None is wealthy but the affluent in soul, who is satisfied and floweth over.

The poor-rich is attenuate for fears, the rich-poor is fattened upon hopes;

Cheerfulness is one man's welcome, and the other warneth from him by his gloom.

Many poor have the pleasures of the rich, even in their own possessions;

And many rich miss the poor man's comforts, and yet feel all his cares.

Liberty is affluence, and the Helots of anxiety never can be counted wealthy;

But he that is disenthralled from fear, goeth for the time a king;

He is royal, great, and opulent, living free of fortune,

And looking on the world as owner of its good, the Maker's child and heir:

Whereas, the covetous is slavish, a very Midas in his avarice,

Full of dismal dreams, and starved amongst his treasures:

The ceaseless spur of discontent goaded him with instant apprehension,

And his thirst for gold could never be quenched, for he drank with the throat of Crassus.

Vanity, and dreary disappointment, care, and weariness, and envy;

Vanity is graven upon all things; wisely spake the preacher.

For ambition is a burning mountain, thrown up amid the turbid sea,

A Stromboli in sullen pride above the hissing waves;

And the statesman climbing there, forgetful of his patriot intentions,

Shall hate the strife of each rough step, or ever he hath toiled midway:

And every truant from his home, the happy home of duty,

Shall live to loathe his eminence of cares, that seething smoke and lava.

Contentment is the temperate repast, flowing with milk and honey:

Ambition is the drunken orgy, fed by liquid flames:

A black and bitter frown is stamped upon the forehead of Ambition,

But fair Contentment's angel-face is rayed with winning smiles.

There was in Tyre a merchant, the favourite child of fortune,

An opulent man with many ships, to trade in many climes;

And he rose up early to his merchandize, after feverish dreaming,

And lay down late to his hot unrest, overwhelmed with calculated cares.

So, day by day, and month by month, and year by year, he gained;

And grew grey, and waxed great: for money brought him all things.

All things?—verily, not all; the kernel of the nut is lacking,—

His mind was a stranger to content, and as for Peace, he knew her not:

Luxuries palled upon his palate, and his eyes were satiate with purple;

He could coin much gold, but buy no happiness with it.

And on a day, a day of dread, in the heat of inordinate ambition,

When he threw with a gambler's hand, to lose or to double his possessions,

The chance hit him,—he had speculated ill,—and men began to whisper;—

Those he trusted, failed; and their usuries had bribed him deeply;

One ship foundered out at sea,—and another met the pirate,—

And so, with broken fortunes, men discreetly shunned him.

He was a stricken stag, and went to hide away in solitude,

And there in humility, he thought,—he resolved, and promptly acted:

From the wreck of all his splendours, from the dregs of the goblet of affluence,

He saved with management a morsel and a drop, for his daily cup and platter:

And lo, that little was enough, and in enough was competence;

His cares were gone,—he slept by night, and lived at peace by day;

Cured of his guilty selfishness,—money's love, envy, competition,—

He lived to be thankful in a cottage that he had lost a palace:

For he found in his abasement what he vainly had sought in high estate,

Both mind and body well at ease, though robed in the russet of the lowly.

Once more; a certain priest, happy in his high vocation,

With faith, and hope, and charity, well served his village altar;

As men count riches, he was poor; but great were his treasures in heaven,

And great his joys on earth, for God's sake doing good:

He had few cares and many consolations, one of the welcome everywhere;

The labourer accounted him his friend, and magnates did him honour at their table:

With a large heart and little means he still made many grateful,

And felt as the centre of a circle, of comfort, calmness, and content.

But, on a weaker sabbath,—for he preached both well and wisely,—

Some casual hearer loudly praised his great neglected talents:

Why should he be buried in obscurity, and throw these pearls to swine?

Could he not still be doing good,—the whilst he pushed his fortunes?

Then came temptation, even on the spark of discontent;

The neighbouring town had a pulpit to be filled; hotly did he canvass, and won it:

Now was he popular and courted, and listened to the spell of admiration,

And toiled to please the taste, rather than to pierce the conscience.

Greedily he sought, and seeking found, the patronizing notice of the great;

He thirsted for emoluments and honours, and counted rich men happy:

So he flattered, so he preached; and gold and fame flowed in;

They flowed in,—he was reaping his reward, and felt himself a fool.

Alas, what a shadow was he following,—how precious was the substance he had left!

Man for God, gold for good, this was his miserable bargain.

The village church, its humble flock, and humbler parish priest,

Zeal, devotion, and approving Heaven,—his books, and simple life,

His little farm and flower-beds,—his recreative rambles with a friend,

And haply, at eventide, the leaping trouts, to help their humble fare,

All these wretchedly exchanged for what the world called fortune,

With the harrowing conscience of a state relapsed to vain ambitions.

Then,—for God was gracious to his soul,—his better thoughts returned,

And better aims with better thoughts, his holy walk of old.

Sickened of style, and ostentation, and the dissipative fashions of society,

He deserted from the ranks of Mammon, and renewed his allegiance to God:

For he found that the praises of men, and all that gold can give,

Are not worthy to be named, against godliness and calm contentment.

OF LIFE.

A child was playing in a garden, a merry little child,

Bounding with triumphant health, and full of happy fancies;

His kite was floating in the sunshine,—but he tied the string to a twig

And ran among the roses to catch a new-born butterfly;

His horn-book lay upon a bank, but the pretty truant hid it,

Buried up in gathered grass, and moss, and sweet wild-thyme;

He launched a paper boat upon the fountain, then wayward turned aside,

To twine some fragrant jessamines about the dripping marble:

So, in various pastime shadowing the schemes of manhood,

That curly-headed boy consumed the golden hours:

And I blessed his glowing face, envying the merry little child,

As he shouted with the ecstasy of being, clapping his hands for joyfulness:

For I said, Surely, O Life, thy name is happiness and hope,

Thy days are bright, thy flowers are sweet, and pleasure the condition of thy gift.

A youth was walking in the moonlight, walking not alone,

For a fair and gentle maid leant on his trembling arm:

Their whispering was still of beauty, and the light of love was in their eyes,

Their twin young hearts had not a thought unvowed to love and beauty;

The stars and the sleeping world, and the guardian eye of God,

The murmur of the distant waterfall, and nightingales warbling in the thicket,

Sweet speech of years to come, and promises of fondest hope,

And more, a present gladness in each other's trust,

All these fed their souls with the hidden manna of affection,

While their faces shone beatified in the radiance of reflected Eden:

I gazed on that fond youth, and coveted his heart,

Attuned to holiest symphonies, with music in its strings:

For I said, Surely, O Life, thy name is love and beauty,

Thy joys are full, thy looks most fair, thy feelings pure and sensitive.

A man sat beside his merchandize, a careworn altered man,

His waking hope, his nightly fear, were money, and its losses:

Rarely was the laugh upon his cheek, except in bitter scorn

For his foolishness of heart, and the lie of its romance, counting Love a treasure.

His talk is of stern Reality, chilling unimaginative facts,

The dull material accidents of this sensual body;

Lucreless honour were contemptible, impoverished affection but a pauper's riches,

Duty, struggling unrewarded, the bargain of a cheated fool:

The market value of a fancy must be measured by the gain it bringeth,

No man is fed or clothed by fame, or love, or duty:—

So toiled he day by day, that cold and joyless man,

I gazed upon his haggard face, and sorrowed for the change:

For I said, Surely, O Life, thy name is care and weariness,

Thy soil is parched, thy winds are fierce, and the suns above thee hardening.

A withered elder lay upon his bed, a desolate man and feeble:

His thoughts were of the past, the early past, the bygone days of youth:

Bitterly repented he the years stolen by the god of this world:

Remembering the maiden of his love, and the heart-stricken wife of his selfishness.

For the sunshiny morning of life came again to him a vivid truth,

But the years of toil as a long dim dream, a cloudy blighted noon:

He saw the nutting schoolboy, but forgat the speculative merchant;

The callous calculating husband was shamed by the generous lover:

He knew that the weeds of worldliness, and the smoky breath of Mammon

Had choked and killed those tender shoots, his yearnings after honour and affection;

So was he sick at heart, and my pity strove to cheer him,

But a deep and dismal gulf lay between comfort and his soul.

Then I said, Surely, O Life, thy name is vanity and sorrow,

Thy storms at noon are many, and thine eventide is clouded by remorse.

Now, when I thought upon these things, my heart was grieved within me:

I wept, with bitterness of speech, and these were the words of my complaining:

"Wherefore then must happiness and love wither into care and vanity,—

Wherefore is the bud so beautiful, but flower and fruit so blighted?

Hard is the lot of man; to be lured by the meteor of romance,

Only to be snared, and to sink, in the turbid mudpool of reality."

Suddenly, a light,—and a rushing presence,—and a consciousness of Something near me,—

I trembled, and listened, and prayed: then I knew the Angel of Life:

Vague, and dimly visible, mine eye could not behold Him,

As, calmly unimpassioned, He looked upon an erring creature;

Unseen, my spirit apprehended Him; though He spake not, yet I heard:

For a sympathetic communing with Him flashed upon my mind electric.

Pensioner of God, be grateful; the gift of Life is good:

The life of heart, and life of soul, mingled with life for the body.

Gladness and beauty are its just inheritance,—the beauty thou hast counted for romance:

And guardian spirits weep that selfishness and sorrow should destroy it.

Thou hast seen the natural blessing marred into a curse by man;

Come then, in favour will I show thee the proper excellence of life.

Keep thou purity, and watch against suspicion,—love shall never perish;

Guard thine innocency spotless, and the buoyancy of childhood shall remain.

Sweet ideals feed the soul, thoughts of loveliness delight it,

The chivalrous affection of uncalculating youth lacketh not honourable wisdom.

Charge not folly on invisibles, that render thee happier and purer,

The fair frail visions of Romance have a use beyond the maxims of the Real.

Behold a patriarch of years, who leaneth on the staff of religion;

His heart is fresh, quick to feel, a bursting fount of generosity:

He, playful in his wisdom, is gladdened in his children's gladness,

He, pure in his experience, loveth in his son's first love:

Lofty aspirations, deep affections, holy hopes are his delight;

His abhorrence is to strip from Life its charitable garment of Idea.

The cold and callous sneerer, who heedeth of the merely practical,

And mocketh at good uses in imaginary things, that man is his scorn:

The hard unsympathizing modern, filled with facts and figures,

Cautious, and coarse, and materialized in mind, that man is his pity.

Passionate thirst for gain never hath burnt within his bosom,

The leaden chains of that dull lust have not bound him prisoner:

The shrewd world laughed at him for honesty, the vain world mouthed at him for honour,

The false world hated him for truth, the cold world despised him for affection:

Still, he kept his treasure, the warm and noble heart,

And in that happy wise old man survive the child and lover.

For human Life is as Chian wine, flavoured unto him who drinketh it,

Delicate fragrance comforting the soul, as needful substance for the body:

Therefore, see thou art pure and guileless; so shall thy Realities of Life

Be sweetened, and tempered, and gladdened by the wholesome spirit of Romance.

Dost thou live, man, dost thou live,—or only breathe and labour?

Art thou free, or enslaved to a routine, the daily machinery of habit?

For, one man is quickened into life, where thousands exist as in a torpor,

Feeding, toiling, sleeping, an insensate weary round:

The plough, or the ledger, or the trade, with animal cares and indolence,

Make the mass of vital years a heavy lump unleavened.

Drowsily lie down in thy dulness, fettered with the irons of circumstance,

Thou wilt not wake to think and feel a minute in a month.

The epitome of common life is seen in the common epitaph,

Born on such a day, and dead on such another, with an interval of threescore years.

For time hath been wasted on the senses, to the hourly diminishing of spirit:

Lean is the soul and pineth, in the midst of abundance for the body:

He forgat the worlds to which he tended, and a creature's true nobility,

Nor wished that hope and wholesome fear should stir him from his hardened satisfaction.

And this is death in life; to be sunk beneath the waters of the Actual,

Without one feebly-struggling sense of an airier spiritual realm:

Affection, fancy, feeling—dead; imagination, conscience, faith,

All wilfully expunged, till they leave the man mere carcase.

See thou livest, whiles thou art: for heart must live, and soul,

But care and sloth and sin and self, combine to kill that life.

A man will grow to an automaton, an appendage to the counter or the desk,

If mind and spirit be not roused, to raise the plodding groveller:

Then praise God for sabbaths, for books, and dreams, and pains,

For the recreative face of nature, and the kindling charities of home;

And remember, thou that labourest,—thy leisure is not loss,

If it help to expose and undermine that solid falsehood, the Material.

Life is a strange avenue of various trees and flowers;

Lightsome at commencement, but darkening to its end, in a distant massy portal.

It beginneth as a little path, edged with the violet and primrose,

A little path of lawny grass, and soft to tiny feet:

Soon, spring thistles in the way, those early griefs of school,

And fruit-trees ranged on either hand show holiday delights:

Anon, the rose and the mimosa hint at sensitive affection,

And vipers hide among the grass, and briars are woven in the hedges:

Shortly, staked along in order, stand the tender saplings,

While hollow hemlock and tall ferns fill the frequent interval:

So advancing, quaintly mixed, majestic line the way

Sturdy oaks, and vigorous elms, the beech and forest-pine:

And here the road is rough with rocks, wide, and scant of herbage,

The sun is hot in heaven, and the ground is cleft and parched:

And many-times a hollow trunk, decayed, or lightning-scathed,

Or in its deadly solitude, the melancholy upas:

But soon, with closer ranks, are set the sentinel trees,

And darker shadows hover amongst Autumn's mellow tints;

Ever and anon, a holly,—junipers, and cypresses, and yews;

The soil is damp; the air is chill; night cometh on apace:

Speed to the portal, traveller,—lo, there is a moon,

With smiling light to guide thee safely through the dreadful shade:

Hark,—that hollow knock,—behold, the warder openeth,

The gate is gaping, and for thee;—those are the jaws of Death!

OF DEATH.

Keep silence, daughter of frivolity,—for Death is in that chamber!

Startle not with echoing sound the strangely solemn peace.

Death is here in spirit, watcher of a marble corpse,—

That eye is fixed, that heart is still,—how dreadful in its stillness!

Death, new tenant of the house, pervadeth all the fabric;

He waiteth at the head, and he standeth at the feet, and hideth in the caverns of the breast:

Death, subtle leech, hath anatomized soul from body,

Dissecting well in every nerve its spirit from its substance:

Death, rigid lord, hath claimed the heriot clay,

While joyously the youthful soul hath gone to take his heritage:

Death, cold usurer, hath seized his bonded debtor;

Death, savage despot, hath caught his forfeit serf;

Death, blind foe, wreaketh petty vengeance on the flesh;

Death, fell cannibal, gloateth on his victim,

And carrieth it with him to the grave, that dismal banquet-hall,

Where in foul state the Royal Goul holdeth secret orgies.

Hide it up, hide it up, draw the decent curtain:

Hence! curious fool, and pry not on corruption:

For the fearful mysteries of change are being there enacted,

And many actors play their part on that small stage, the tomb.

Leave the clay, that leprous thing, touch not the fleshly garment:

Dust to dust, it mingleth well among the sacred soil:

It is scattered by the winds, it is wafted by the waves, it mixeth with herbs and cattle,

But God hath watched those morsels, and hath guided them in care:

Each waiting soul must claim his own, when the archangel soundeth,

And all the fields, and all the hills, shall move a mass of life;

Bodies numberless crowding on the land, and covering the trampled sea,

Darkening the air precipitate, and gathered scatheless from the fire;

The Himalayan peaks shall yield their charge, and the desolate steppes of Siberia,

The MaelstrÖm disengulph its spoil, and the iceberg manumit its captive:

All shall teem with life, the converging fragments of humanity,

Till every conscious essence greet his individual frame;

For in some dignified similitude, alike, yet different in glory,

This body shall be shaped anew, fit dwelling for the soul:

The hovel hath grown to a palace, the bulb hath burst into the flower,

Matter hath put on incorruption, and is at peace with spirit.

Amen,—and so it shall be:—but now, the scene is drear,—

Yea, though promises and hope strive to cheat its sadness;

Full of grief, though faith herself is strong to speed the soul,

For the partner of its toil is left behind to endure an ordeal of change.

Dear partner, dear and frail, my loved though humble home,—

Should I cast thee off without a pang, as a garment flung aside?

Many years, for joy and sorrow, have I dwelt in thee,

How shall I be reckless of thy weal, nor hope for thy perfection?—

This also, He that lent thee for my uses in mortality,

Shall well fulfil with boundless praise on that returning day:

Behold, thou shalt be glorified: thou, mine abject friend,

And should I meanly scorn thy state, until it rise to greatness?

Far be it, O my soul, from thine expectant essence,

To be heedless, if indignity or folly desecrate those thine ashes:

Keep them safe with careful love; and let the mound be holy;

And, thou that passest by, revere the waiting dead.

Naples sitteth by the sea, key-stone of an arch of azure,

Crowned by consenting nations peerless queen of gaiety:

She laugheth at the wrath of Ocean, she mocketh the fury of Vesuvius,

She spurneth disease and misery and famine, that crowd her sunny streets:

The giddy dance, the merry song, the festal glad procession,

The noonday slumber and the midnight serenade,—all these make up her Life:

Her Life?—and what her Death?—look we to the end of life,—

Solon, and Tellus the Athenian, wisely have ye pointed to the grave.

For behold yon dreary precinct,—those hundreds of stone wells,

A pit for a day, a pit for a day,—a pit to be sealed for a year:

And in the gloom of night, they raise the year-closed lid,—

Look in,—for gnawing lime hath half consumed the carcases;

Thus they hurl the daily dead into that horrible pit,

The dead that only died this day,—as unconsidered offal!

There, a stark white heap, unwept, unloved, uncared for,

Old men and maidens, young men and infants, mingle in hideous corruption;

Fling in the gnawing lime,—seal up the charnel for a year;

For lo, a morrow's dawn hath tinged the mountain summit.

O fair false city, thou gay and gilded harlot,

Woe, for thy wanton heart, woe, for thy wicked hardness:

Woe unto thee, that the lightsomeness of Life, beneath Italian suns,

Should meet the solemnity of Death, in a sepulchre so foul and fearful.

For that, even to the best, the wise and pure and pious,

Death, repulsive king, thine iron rule is terrible:

Yea, and even at the best, in company of buried kindred,

With hallowing rites, and friendly tears, and the dear old country church,

Death, cold and lonely, thy frigid face is hateful,

The bravest look on thee with dread, the humblest curse thy coming.

Still, ye unwise among mankind, your foolishness hath added fears;

The crowded cemetery, the catacomb of bones, the pestilential vault,

With fancy's gliding ghost at eve, her moans and flaky footfalls,

And the gibbering train of terror to fright your coward hearts.

We speak not here of sin, nor the phantoms of a bloody conscience,

Nor of solaces, and merciful pardon: we heed but the inevitable grave;

The grave, that wage of guilt, that due return to dust,

The grave, that goal of earth, and starting-post for Heaven.

Plant it with laurels, sprinkle it with lilies, set it upon yonder dewy hill

Midst holy prayers, and generous griefs, and consecrating blessings:

Let Sophocles sleep among his ivy, green perennial garlands,

Let olives shade their Virgil, and roses bloom above Corinne;

To his foster-mother, Ocean, entrust the mariner in hope;

The warrior's spirit, let it rise on high from the flaming fragrant pyre.

But heap not coffins and corruption to infect the mass of living,

Nor steal from odious realities the charitable poetry of Death:

It is wise to gild uncomeliness, it is wise to mask necessity,

It is wise from cheerful sights and sounds to draw their gentle uses:

Hide the facts, the bitter facts, the foul, and fearful facts,

Tend the body well in hope, this were praise and wisdom:

But to plunge in gloom the parting soul, that hath loved its clay tenement so long,

This were vanity and folly, the counsel of moroseness and despair.

Not thus, the Scythian of old time welcomed Death with songs;

Not thus, the shrewd Egyptian decorated Death with braveries;

Not thus, on his funeral tower sleepeth the sun-worshipping Parsee;

Not thus, the Moslem saint lieth in his arabesque mausoleum;

Not thus, the wild red Indian, hunter of the far Missouri,

In flowering trees hath nested up his forest-loving ancestry;

Not thus, the Switzer mountaineer scattereth ribboned garlands

About the rustic cross that halloweth the bed of his beloved;

Not thus, the village maiden wisheth she may die in spring,

With store of violets and cowslips to be sprinkled on her snow-white shroud;

Not thus, the dying poet asketh a cheerful grave,—

Lay him in the sunshine, friends, nor sorrow that a Christian hath departed!

Yea; it is the poetry of Death, an Orpheus gladdening HadËs,

To care with mindful love for all so dear—and dead;

To think of them in hope, to look for them in joy, and—but for its simple vanity,—

To pray with all the earnestness of nature for souls who cannot change.

For the tree is felled, and boughed, and bare, and the Measurer standeth with His line;

The chance is gone for ever, and is past the reach of prayer:

For men and angels, good and ill, have rendered all their witness;

The trial is over, the jury are gone in, and none can now be heard;

Well are they agreed upon the verdict, just, and fixt, and final,

And the sentence showeth clear, before the Judge hath spoken:

Now,—while resting matter is at peace within the tomb,

The conscious spirit watcheth in unspeakable suspense;

Racked with a fearful looking-forward, or blissfully feeding on the foretaste,

Waiting souls in eager expectation pass the solemn interval:

They slumber not at death, but awaken, quickened to the terrors of the judgment;

They lie not insensate among darkness, but exult, looking forward to the light:

Idiotcy, brightening on the instant, when that veil is torn,

Is grateful that his torpor here hath left him as an innocent:

The young child, stricken as he played, and guileless babes unborn,

Freed from fetters of the flesh, burst into mind immediate:

Madness judgeth wisely, and the visions of the lunatic are gone,

And each hasteneth to praise the mercy that made him irresponsible.

For the soul is one, though manifold in act, working the machinery of brain,

Reason, fancy, conscience, passion, are but varying phases;

If, in God's wise purpose, the machine were shattered or confused,

Still is soul the same, though it exhibit with a difference:

Therefore, dissipate the brain, and set its inmate free,

Behold, the maniacs and embryos stand in their place intelligent.

That solvent eateth away all dross, leaving the gold intact:

Matter lingereth in the retort, spirit hath flown to the receiver:

And lo, that recipient of the spirits, it is some aerial world,

An oasis midway on the desert space, separating earth from heaven,

A prison-house for essences incorporate, a limbus vague and wide,

Tartarus for evil, and Paradise for good, that intermediate HadËs.

O Death, what art thou? a Lawgiver that never altereth,

Fixing the consummating seal, whereby the deeds of life become established:

O Death, what art thou? a stern and silent usher,

Leading to the judgment for Eternity, after the trial-scene of Time:

O Death, what art thou? an Husbandman, that reapeth always,

Out of season, as in season, with the sickle in his hand:

O Death, what art thou? the shadow unto every substance,

In the bower as in the battle, haunting night and day:

O Death, what art thou? Nurse of dreamless slumbers

Freshening the fevered flesh to a wakefulness eternal:

O Death, what art thou? strange and solemn Alchymist,

Elaborating life's elixir from these clayey crucibles:

O Death, what art thou? Antitype of Nature's marvels,

The seed and dormant chrysalis bursting into energy and glory.

Thou calm safe anchorage for the shattered hulls of men,—

Thou spot of gelid shade, after the hot-breathed desert,—

Thou silent waiting-hall, where Adam meeteth with his children,—

How full of dread, how full of hope, loometh inevitable Death:

Of dread, for all have sinned; of hope, for One hath saved;

The dread is drowned in joy, the hope is filled with immortality!

—Pass along, pilgrim of life, go to thy grave unfearing,

The terrors are but shadows now, that haunt the vale of Death.

OF IMMORTALITY.

Gird up thy mind to contemplation, trembling inhabitant of earth;

Tenant of a hovel for a day,—thou art heir of the universe for ever!

For, neither congealing of the grave, nor gulphing waters of the firmament,

Nor expansive airs of heaven, nor dissipative fires of Gehenna,

Nor rust of rest, nor wear, nor waste, nor loss, nor chance, nor change,

Shall avail to quench or overwhelm the spark of soul within thee!

Thou art an imperishable leaf on the evergreen bay-tree of Existence;

A word from Wisdom's mouth, that cannot be unspoken;

A ray of Love's own light; a drop in Mercy's sea;

A creature, marvellous and fearful, begotten by the fiat of Omnipotence.

I, that speak in weakness, and ye, that hear in charity,

Shall not cease to live and feel, though flesh must see corruption;

For the prison-gates of matter shall be broken, and the shackled soul go free,

Free, for good or ill, to satisfy its appetence for ever:

For ever,—dreadful doom, to be hurried on eternally to evil,—

For ever,—happy fate, to ripen into perfectness—for ever!

And is there a thought within thy heart, O slave of sin and fear,

A black and harmful hope, that erring spirit dieth?

That primal disobedience hath ensured the death of soul,

And separate evil sealed it thine—thy curse, Annihilation?

Heed thou this; there is a Sacrifice; the Maker is Redeemer of His creature;

Freely unto each, universally to all, is restored the privilege of essence:

Whether unto grace or guilt, all must live through Him,

Live in vital joy, or live in dying woe:

Death in Adam, Life in Christ; the curse hung upon the cross:

Who art thou that heedest of redemption, as narrower than the fall?

All were dead,—He died for all; that living, they might love;

If living souls withhold their love,—still, He hath died for them.

Eve stole the knowledge; Christ gave the life:

Knowledge and life are the perquisites of soul, the privilege of Man:

Mercy stepped between, and stayed the double theft;

God gave; and giving, bought; and buying, asketh love:

And in such asking rendereth bliss, to all that hear and answer,

For love with life is heaven; and life unloving, hell.

Creature of God, His will is for thy weal, eternally progressing;

Fear not to trust a Maker's love, nor a Saviour's ransom:

He drank for all,—for thee, and me,—the poison of our deeds;

We shall not die, but live,—and, of His grace, we love.

For, in the mysteries of Mercy, the One fore-knowing Spirit

Outstrippeth reason's halting choice, and winneth men to Him:

Who shall sound the depths? who shall reach the heights?

Freedom, in the gyves of fate; and sovereignty, reconciled with justice.

If then, as annihilate by sin, the soul was ever forfeit,

Godhead paid the mighty price, the pledge hath been redeemed:

He from the waters of Oblivion raised the drowning race,

Lifting them even to Himself, the baseless Rock of Ages.

None can escape from Adam's guilt, or second Adam's guerdon:

Sin and death are thine; thine also is interminable being:

Let it be even as thou wilt, still are we ransomed from nonentity,

The worlds of bliss and woe are peopled with immortals:

And ruin is thy blame; for thou, the worst, art free

To take from Heaven the grace of love, as the gift of life:

Yet is not remedy thy praise; for thou, the best, art bound

In self, and sin, and darkling sloth, until He break the chain:

None can tell, without a struggle, if that chain be broken;

Strive to-day,—one effort more may prove that thou art free!

Here is faith and prayer, here is the Grace and the Atonement,

Here is the creature feeling for its God, and the prodigal returning to his Father.

But, behold, His reasonable children, standing in just probation,

With ears to hear, neglect; with eyes to see, refuse:

They will not have the blessing with the life, the blessing that enricheth Immortality;

And look for pleasures out of God, for heaven in life alone:

So, they snatch that awful prize, existence void of love,

And in their darkening exile make a needful hell of self.

Therefore fear, thou sinner, lest the huge blessing, Immortality,

Be blighted in thine evil to a curse,—it were better he had not been born:

Therefore hope, thou saint, for the gift of Immortality is free;

Take and live, and live in love; fear not, thou art redeemed!

The happy life, that height of hope, the knowledge of all good,

This is the blessing on obedience, obedience the child of faith:

The miserable life, that depth of all despair, the knowledge of all evil,

This is the curse upon impenitence, impenitence that sprung of unbelief.

God, from a beautiful necessity, is Love in all He doeth,

Love, a brilliant fire, to gladden or consume:

The wicked work their woe by looking upon love, and hating it:

The righteous find their joys in yearning on its loveliness for ever.

Who shall imagine Immortality, or picture its illimitable prospect?

How feebly can a faltering tongue express the vast idea!

For consider the primÆval woods that bristle over broad Australia,

And count their autumn leaves, millions multiplied by millions;

Thence look up to a moonless sky from a sleeping isle of the ÆgÆan,

And add to these leaves yon starry host, sparkling on the midnight numberless;

Thence traverse an Arabia, some continent of eddying sand,

Gather each grain, let none escape, add them to the leaves and to the stars;

Afterward gaze upon the sea, the thousand leagues of an Atlantic,

Take drop by drop, and add their sum, to the grains, and leaves, and stars;

The drops of ocean, the desert sands, the leaves, and stars innumerable,

(Albeit, in that multitude of multitudes, each small unit were an age,)

All might reckon for an instant, a transient flash of Time,

Compared with this intolerable blaze, the measureless enduring of Eternity!

O grandest gift of the Creator,—O largess worthy of a God,—

Who shall grasp that thrilling thought, life and joy for ever?

For the sun in heaven's heaven is Love that cannot change,

And the shining of that sun is life, to all beneath its beams:

Who shall arrest it in the firmament,—or drag it from its sphere?

Or bid its beauty smile no more, but be extinct for ever?

Yea, where God hath given, none shall take away,

Nor build up limits to His love, nor bid His bounty cease;

Wide, as space is peopled, endless as the empire of heaven,

The river of the water of life floweth on in majesty for ever!

Why should it seem a thing impossible to thee, O man of many doubts,

That God shall wake the dead, and give this mortal immortality?

Is it that such riches are unsearchable, the bounty too profuse?

And yet, what gift, to cease or change, is worthy of the King Almighty?

For remember the moment thou art not, thou mightest as well not have been;

A millennium and an hour are equal in the gulph of that desolate abyss, annihilation:

If Adam had existed till to-day, and to-day had perished utterly,

What were his gain in length of a life, that hath passed away for ever?

No tribute of thanks can exhale from the empty censer of nonentity;

The Giver, with His gift reclaimed, is mulcted of all praise.

Tell me, ye that strive in vain to cramp and dwarf the soul,

Wherefore should it cease to be, and when shall essence die?

It is,—and therefore shall be, till just obstacle opposeth:

Show no cause for change, and reason leaneth to continuance.

The body verily shall change; this curious house we live in

Never had continuing stay, but changeth every instant:

But the spiritual tenant of the house abideth in unalterable consciousness,

He may fly to many lands, but cannot flee himself.

The soil wherein ye drop the seed, by suns or rains may vary;

But the seed is the same; and soul is the seed; and flesh but its anchorage to earth.

The machine may be broken, and rust corrode the springs: but can rust feed on motion?

Worms may batten on the brain: but can worms gnaw the mind?

Dynamics are, and dwell apart, though matter be not made;

Spirit is, and can be separate, though a body were not:

Power is one, be it lever, screw, or wedge; but it needeth these for illustration:

Mind is one, be it casual or ideal; but it is shown in these.

The creature is constructed individual, for trial of his reasonable will,

Clay and soul, commingled wisely, mingled not confused:

As power is not in the spring, till somewhat give it action,

So, until spirit be infused, the organism lieth inergetic.

Or shalt thou say that mind is the delicate offspring of matter,

The bright consummate flower that must perish with its leaf?

Go to: doth weight breed lightness? is freedom the atmosphere of prisons?

When did the body elevate, expand, and bud the mind?

Lo, a red-hot cinder flung from the furnaces of Ætna,—

There is fire in that ash; but did the pumice make it?

Nay, cold clod, never canst thou generate a flame,

Nay, most exquisite machinery, nevermore elaborate a mind:

Rather do ye battle and contend, opposite the one to the other;

Till God shall stop the strife, and call the body colleague.

Garment of flesh, and art thou then a vest, so tinged with subtle poison,

(Maddening tunic of the centaur,) as to kill the soul?

Not so: fruit of disobedience, rot in dissolution, as thou must,—

The seed is in the core, its germ is safe, and life is in that germ:

Moreover, Marah shall be sweetened; and a Good Physician

Yet shall heal those gangrene wounds, the spotted plague of sin:

He, through worldly trials, and the separative cleansing of the grave,

Shall change its corruptible to glory, and wash that garment white.

Still, is the whisper in thy heart, that oftenest the bed of death

Seemeth but a sluggish ebb, of sinking soul and body?

Mind dwelling, long-time, sensual in the chambers of the flesh,

May slumber on in conscious sloth, and wilfully be dulled:

But is it therefore nigh to dissolution, even as the body of this death?

Ask the stricken conscience, gasping out its terrors;

Ask the dying miser, loth to leave his gold;

Ask the widowed poor, confiding her fatherless to strangers;

Ask the martyr-maid, a broken reed so strong,

That weak and tortured frame, with triumph on its brow!—

O thou gainsayer, the finger of disease may seem to reach the soul,

But it is a spiritual touch, sympathy with that which aileth:

Pain or fear may dislocate and shatter this delicate machinery of nerves;

But madness proveth mind: the fault is in the engine, not the impetus:

Dissipate the mists of matter, lo, the soul is clear:

Timour's cage bowed it in the dust; but now it goeth forth a freedman.

Yet more, there is reason in moralities, that the soul must live;

If God be king in heaven, or have care for earth.

Can wickedness have triumphed with impunity, or virtue toiled unseen?

Shall cruelty torture unavenged, and the innocent complain unheard?

Is there no recompense for woe, must there be no other world for justice,—

No hope in setting suns of good, nor terror for the evil at its zenith?

How shall ye make answer unto this; a just God prospering iniquity,

Wisdom encouraging the foolish, and goodness abetting the depraved!

Yet again; mine erring brother, pardon this abundance of my speech,

Yield me thy candour and thy charity, listening with a welcome:

For, even now, a thousand thoughts are trooping to my theme;

O mighty theme, O feeble thoughts! Alas! who is sufficient?

Judge not so high a cause by these poor words alone,

For lo, the advocate hath little skill: pardon and pass on:

Certify thyself with surer proofs; fledge thine own mind for flight;

Think, and pray; those better proofs shall follow on with holy aspiration.

Yet in my humbler grade to help thy weal and comfort,

Thy weal for this and higher worlds, and comfort in thy sickness,

Suffer the multitude of fancies, walking with me still in love;

But tread in fear, it is holy ground,—remember, Immortality!

Wilt thou argue from infirmities, thine abject evil state,

As how should stricken wretched man indeed exist for ever:

The brutal and besotted, the savage and the slave, the sucking infant and the idiot,

The mass of mean and common minds, and all to be immortal?—

Consider every beginning, how small it is and feeble:

Ganges, and the rolling Mississippi sprung of brooks among the mountains;

The Yew-tree of a thousand years was once a little seed,

And Nero's marble Rome, a shepherd's mud-built hovel:

A speck is on the tropic sky, and it groweth to the terrible tornado;

An apple, all too fair to see, destroyed a world of souls:

A tender babe is born,—it is Attila, scourge of the nations!

A seeming malefactor dieth,—it is Jesus, the Saviour of men!

And hive not in thy thoughts the vain and wordy notion

That nothing which was born in Time can tire out the footsteps of Infinity:

Reckon up a sum in numbers; where shall progression stop?

The starting-post is definite and fixed, but what is the goal of numeration?

So, begin upon a moment, and when shall being end?

Souls emanate from God, to travel with Him equally for ever.

Moreover, thou that objectest the unenterable circle of eternity,

That none but He from everlasting can endure, as to a future everlasting,

Consider, may it be impossible that creatures were counted in their Maker,

And so, that the confines of Eternity are filled by God alone?

Trust not thy soul upon a fancy: who would freight a bubble with a diamond,

And launch that priceless gem on the boiling rapids of a cataract?

If then we perish not at death, but walk in spirit through the darkness,

Waiting for a mansion incorruptible, whereof this body is the seed,

Tell me, when shall be the period? time and its ordeals are done:

The storms are passed, the night is at end, behold the Sabbath morning.

Is death to be conqueror again, and claim once more the victory,—

Can the enemy's corpse awaken into life, and bruise the Champion's head?

Evil, terrible ensample, that foil to the attributes of Good,

Is banished to its own black world, weeded out of earth and heaven:

Shall that great gulf be passed, and sin be sown again?—

We know but this, the book of truth proclaimeth gladly, Never!

There remaineth the will of our God: when He repenteth of His creature,

Made by self-suggested mercy, ransomed by self-sacrificing justice,—

When Truth, that swore unto his neighbour, disappointeth him, and cleaveth to a lie,—

When the counsels of Wisdom are confounded, and Love warreth with itself,—

When the Unchangeable is changed, and the arm of Omnipotence is broken,—

Then,—thy quenchless soul shall have reached the goal of its existence.

But it seemeth to thy notions of the merciful and just, a false and fearful thing,

To lay such a burden upon time, that eternity be built on its foundation:

As if so casual good or ill should colour all the future,

And the vanity of accident, or sternness of necessity, save or wreck a soul.

Were it casual, vain, or stern, this might pass for truth:

But all things are marshalled by Design, and carefully tended by Benevolence.

O man, thy Judge is righteous,—noting, remembering, and weighing;—

Want, ignorance, diversities of state, are cast into the balance of advantage:

The poisonous example of a parent asketh for allowance in the child;

Care, diseases, toils, and frailties,—all things are considered.

And again, a mysterious Omniscience knoweth the spirits that are His,

While the delicate tissues of Event are woven by the fingers of Ubiquity.

Should Providence be taken by surprise from the possible impinging of an accident,

One fortuitous grain might dislocate the banded universe:

The merest seeming trifle is ordered as the morning light;

And He, that rideth on the hurricane, is pilot of the bubble on the breaker.

Once more, consider Matter, how small a thing is father to the greatest;

Thou that lightly hast regarded the results of so-called accident.

A blade of grass took fire in the sun,—and the prairies are burnt to the horizon:

A grain of sand may blind the eye, and madden the brain to murder:

A careful fly deposited its egg in the swelling bud of an acorn,—

The sapling grew,—cankrous and gnarled,—it is yonder hollow oak:

A child touched a spring, and the spring closed a valve, and the labouring engine burst,—

A thousand lives were in that ship,—wrecked by an infant's finger!

Shall nature preach in vain? thy casualty, guided in its orbit,

Though less than a mote upon the sunbeam, saileth in a fleet of worlds;

That trivial cause, watered and observed of the Husbandman day by day,—

In calm undeviating strength doth work its large effect.

Thus, in the pettiness of life note thou seeds of grandeur,

And watch the hour-glass of Time with the eyes of an heir of Immortality.

There still be clouds of witnesses,—if thou art not weary of my speech,—

Flocks of thoughts adding lustre to the light, and pointing on to Life.

For reflect how Truth and Goodness, well and wisely put,

Commend themselves to every mind with wondrous intuition:

What is this? the recognition of a standard, unwritten, natural, uniform;

Telling of one common source, the root of Good and True.

And if thus present soul can trace descent from Deity,

Being, as it standeth, individual, a separate reasonable thing,

What should hinder that its hope may not trace gladly forward,

And, in astounding parallel, like Enoch walk with God?

Yea, the genealogy of soul, that vivifying breath of a Creator,

Breath, no transient air, but essence, energy, and reason,

Is looming on the past, and shadowing the future, sublimely as Melchisedek of old,

Having not beginning, nor end of days, but present in the majesty of Peace!

O false scholar, credulous in vanities, and only sceptical of truth,

Wherefore toil to cheat thy soul of its birthright, Immortality?

Is it for thy guilt? He pardoneth: Is it for thy frailty? He will help:

Though thou fearest, He is love; and Mercy shall be deeper than Despair:

Even for thy full-blown pride, is it much to be receiver of a God?

And lo, thy rights, He made thee; thy claims, He hath redeemed.

Hath the fair aspect of affection no beauty that thou shouldst desire it?

And are those sorrows nothing, to thee that passest by?

For it is Fact, immutable, that God hath dwelt in Man:

With gentle generous love ennobling while He bought us.

What, though thou art false, ignorant, weak and daring,—

Can the sun be quenched in heaven—or only Belisarius be blind?

But, even stooping to thy folly, grant all these hopes are vain;

Stultify reason, wrestle against conscience, and wither up the heart:

Where is thy vast advantage?—I have all that thou hast,

The buoyancy of life as strong, and term of days no shorter;

My cup is full with gladness, my griefs are not more galling:

And thus, we walk together, even to the gates of death:

There, (if not also on my journey, blessing every step,

Gladdening with light, and quickening with love, and killing all my cares,)

There,—while thou art quailing, or sullenly expecting to be nothing,—

There,—is found my gain; I triumph, where thou tremblest.

Grant all my solace is a lie, yet it is a fountain of delight,

A spice in every pleasure, and a balm for every pain:

O precious wise delusion, scattering both misery and sin,—

O vile and silly truth, depraving while it curseth!

Darkling child of knowledge, commune with Socrates and Cicero,

They had no prejudice of birth, no dull parental warpings;

See, those lustrous minds anticipate the dawning day,—

Whilst thou, poor mole, art burrowing back to darkness from the light.

I will not urge a revelation, mercies, miracles, and martyrs,

But, after twice a thousand years, go, learn thou of the pagan:

It were happier and wiser even among fools, to cling to the shadow of a hope,

Than, in the company of sages, to win the substance of despair;

But here, the sages hope; despair is with the fools,

The base bad hearts, the stolid heads, the sensual and the selfish.

And wilt thou, sorry scorner, mock the phrase, despair?

Despair for those who die and live,—for me, I live and die:

What have I to do with dread?—my taper must go out;—

I nurse no silly hopes, and therefore feel no fears:

I am hastening to an end.—O false and feeble answer:

For hope is in thee still, and fear, a racking deep anxiety.

Erring brother, listen: and take thine answer from the ancients:

Consider every end, that it is but the end of a beginning.

All things work in circles; weariness induceth unto rest,

Rest invigorateth labour, and labour causeth weariness:

War produceth peace, and peace is wanton unto war:

Light dieth into darkness, and night dawneth into day:

The rotting jungle reeds scatter fertility around;

The buffalo's dead carcase hath quickened life in millions:

The end of toil is gain, the end of gain is pleasure,

Pleasure tendeth unto waste, and waste commandeth toil.

So, is death an end,—but it breedeth an infinite beginning;

Limits are for time, and death killed time: Eternity's beginning is for ever.

Ambition, hath it any goal indeed? is not all fruition, disappointment?

A step upon the ladder, and another, and another,—we start from every end?

Look to the eras of mortality, babe, student, man,

The husband, the father, the death-bed of a saint,—and is it then an end?

That common climax, Death, shall it lead to nothing?

How strong a root of causes flowering a consequence of vapour:

That solid chain of facts, is it to be snapped for ever?

How stout a show of figures, weakly summing to nonentity.

Or haply, Death, in the doublings of thy thought, shall seem continuous ending;

A dull eternal slumber, not an end abrupt.

O most futile chrysalis, wherefore dost thou sleep?

Dreamless, unconscious, never to awake,—what object in such slumber?

If thou art still to live, it may as well be wakefully as sleeping:

How grovelling must that spirit be, to need eternal sleep!

Or was indeed the toil of life so heavy and so long,

That nevermore can rest refresh thine overburdened soul?—

Sleep is a recreance to body, but when was mind asleep?

Even in a swoon it dreameth, though all be forgotten afterward:

The muscles seek relaxing, and the irritable nerves ask peace;

But life is a constant force, spirit an unquietable impetus:

The eye may wear out as a telescope, and the brain work slow as a machine,

But soul unwearied, and for ever, is capable of effort unimpaired.

I live, move, am conscious: what shall bar my being?

Where is the rude hand, to rend this tissue of existence?

Not thine, shadowy Death, what art thou but a phantom?

Not thine, foul Corruption, what art thou but a fear?

For death is merely absent life, as darkness absent light;

Not even a suspension, for the life hath sailed away, steering gladly somewhere.

And corruption, closely noted, is but a dissolving of the parts,

The parts remain, and nothing lost, to build a better whole.

Moreover, mind is unity, however versatile and rapid;

Thou canst not entertain two coincident ideas, although they quickly follow:

And Unity hath no parts, so that there is nothing to dissolve:

An element is still unchanged in every searching solvent.

Who then shall bid me be annulled,—He that gave me being?

Amen, if God so will; I know that will is love:

But love hath promised life, and therefore I shall live;

So long as He is God, I shall be His Creature!

And here, shrewd reasoner, so eager to prove that thou must perish,

I note a sneer upon thy lip, and ridicule is haply on thy tongue:

How, said he,—creature of a God, and are not all His creatures,—

The lion, and the gnat,—yea, the mushroom, and the crystal,—have all these a soul?

Thy fancies tend to prove too much, and overshoot the mark:

If I die not with brutes, then brutes must live with me?—

I dare not tell thee that they will, for the word is not in my commission;

But of the twain it is the likelier; continuance is the chance:

Men, dying in their sins, are likened unto beasts that perish;

They are dark, animal, insensate, but have they not a lurking soul?

The spirit of a man goeth upward, reasonable, apprehending God;

The spirit of a beast goeth downward, sensual, doting on the creature:

Who told thee they die at dissolution?—boldly think it out,—

The multitude of flies, and the multitude of herbs, the world with all its beings:

Is Infinity too narrow, Omnipotence too weak, and Love so anxious to destroy,

Doth Wisdom change its plan, and a Maker cancel His created?

God's will may compass all things, to fashion and to nullify at pleasure:

Yet are there many thoughts of hope, that all which are shall live.

True, there is no conscience in the brute, beyond some educated habit,

They lay them down without a fear, and wake without a hope:

Hunger and pain is of the animal: but when did they reckon or compare?

They live, idealess, in instinct; and while they breathe they gain:

The master is an idol to his dog, who cannot rise beyond him;

And void of capability for God, there would seem small cause for an infinity.

Therefore, caviller, my poor thoughts dare not grant they live:

But is it not a great thing to assume their annihilation—and thine own?

Would it be much if a speck on space, this globe with all its millions,

Verily, after its pollution, were suffered to exist in purity?

Or much, if guiltless creatures, that were cruelly entreated upon earth,

Found some commensurate reward in lower joys hereafter?

Or much, if a Creator, prodigal of life, and filled with the profundity of love,

Rejoice in all creatures of His skill, and lead them to perfection in their kind?

O man, there are many marvels; yet life is more a mystery than death:

For death may be some stagnant life,—but life is present God!

Many are the lurking-holes of evil; who shall search them out?

Who so skilled to cut away the cancer with its fibres?

For wily minds with sinuous ease escape from lie to lie;

And cowards driven from the trench steal back to hide again.

Vain were the battle, if a warrior, having slain his foes,

Shall turn and find them vital still, unharmed, yea, unashamed:

For Error, dark magician, daily cast out killed,

Quickeneth animate anew beneath the midnight moon:

Once and again, once and again, hath reason answered wisely;

But not the less with brazen front doth folly urge her questions.

It were but unprofitable toil, a stand-up fight with unbelief:

When was there candour in a caviller, and who can satisfy the faithless?

Too long, O truant from the fold, have I tracked thy devious paths;

Too long, treacherous deserter, fought thee as a noble foeman:

Haply, my small art, and an arm too weakly for its weapon,

Hath failed to pierce thine iron coat, and reach thy stricken soul:

Haply, the fervour of my speech, and too patient sifting of thy fancies,

Shall tend to make thee prize them more, as worthier and wiser:

Go to: be mine the gain: we measure swords no more;

Go,—and a word go with thee,—Man, thou ART Immortal!

Child of light, and student in the truth, too long have I forgotten thee:

Lo, after parley with an alien, let me hold sweet converse with a brother.

Glorious hopes and ineffable imaginings, crowd our holy theme,

Fear hath been slaughtered on the portal, and Doubt driven back to darkness:

For Christ hath died, and we in Him; by faith His All is ours;

Cross and crown, and love, and life; and we shall reign in Him!

Yea, there is a fitness and a beauty in ascribing immortality to mind,

That its energies and lofty aspirations may have scope for indefinite expansion.

To learn all things is privilege of reason, and that with a growing capability,

But in this age of toil and time we scarce attain to alphabets:

How hardly in the midst of our hurry, and jostled by the cares of life,

Shall a man turn and stop to consider mighty secrets;

With barely hours, and barely powers, to fill up daily duties,

How small the glimpse of knowledge his wondering eye can catch!

And knowledge is a noting of the order wherein God's attributes evolve,

Therefore worthy of the creature, worthy of an angel's seeking;

Yea, and human knowledge, meagre though the harvest,

Hath its roots, both deep and strong; but the plants are exotic to the climate;

All we seem to know demand a longer learning,

History and science, and prophecy and art, are workings all of God:

And there are galaxies of globes, millions of unimagined beings,

Other senses, wondrous sounds, and thoughts of thrilling fire,

Powers of strange might, quickening unknown elements,

And attributes and energies of God which man may never guess.

Not in vain, O brother, hath soul the spurs of enterprize,

Nor aimlessly panteth for adventure, waiting at the cave of mystery:

Not in vain the cup of curiosity, sweet and richly spiced,

Is ruby to the sight, and ambrosia to the taste, and redolent with all fragrance:

Thou shalt drink, and deeply, filling the mind with marvels;

Thou shalt watch no more, lingering, disappointed of thy hope;

Thou shalt roam where road is none, a traveller untrammelled,

Speeding at a wish, emancipate, to where the stars are suns!

Count, count your hopes, heirs of immortality and love;

And hear my kindred faith, and turn again to bless me.

For lo, my trust is strong to dwell in many worlds,

And cull of many brethren there, sweet knowledge ever new:

I yearn for realms where fancy shall be filled, and the ecstasies of freedom shall be felt,

And the soul reign gloriously, risen to its royal destinies:

I look to recognize again, through the beautiful mask of their perfection,

The dear familiar faces I have somewhile loved on earth:

I long to talk with grateful tongue of storms and perils past,

And praise the mighty Pilot that hath steered us through the rapids:

He shall be the focus of it all, the very heart of gladness,—

My soul is athirst for God, the God who dwelt in Man!

Prophet, priest, and king, the sacrifice, the substitute, the Saviour,

Rapture of the blessed in the hunted One of earth, the Pardoner in the victim;

How many centuries of joy concentrate in that theme,

How often a Methusalem might count his thousand years, and leave it unexhausted!

And lo, the heavenly Jerusalem, with all its gates one pearl,

That pearl of countless price, the door by which we entered,—

Come, tread the golden streets, and join that glorious throng,

The happy ones of heaven and earth, ten thousand times ten thousand;

Hark, they sing that song,—and cast their crowns before Him;

Their souls alight with love,—Glory, and Praise, and Immortality!—

Veil thine eyes: no son of time may see that holy vision,

And even the seraph at thy side hath covered his face with wings.

Doth he not speak parables?—each one goeth on his way,

Ye that hear, and I that counsel, go on our ways forgetful.

For the terrible realities whereto we tend, are hidden from our eyes,

We know, but heed them not, and walk as if the temporal were all things.

Vanities, buzzing on the ear, fill its drowsy chambers,

Slow to dread those coming fears, the thunder and the trumpet;

Motes, steaming on the sight, dim our purblind eyes,

Dark to see the ponderous orb of nearing Immortality:

Hemmed in by hostile foes, the trifler is busied on an epigram;

The dull ox, driven to slaughter, careth but for pasture by the way.

Alas, that the precious things of truth, and the everlasting hills,

The mighty hopes we spake of, and the consciousness we feel,—

Alas, that all the future, and its adamantine facts,

Clouded by the present with intoxicating fumes,—

Should seem even to us, the great expectant heirs,

To us, the responsible and free, fearful sons of reason,

Only as a lovely song, sweet sounds of solemn music,

A pleasant voice, and nothing more,—doth he not speak parables?

Look to thy soul, O man, for none can be surety for his brother:

Behold, for heaven—or for hell,—thou canst not escape from Immortality!

OF IDEAS.

Mind is like a volatile essence, flitting hither and thither,

A solitary sentinel of the fortress body, to show himself everywhere by turns:

Mind is indivisible and instant, with neither parts nor organs,

That it doeth, it doth quickly, but the whole mind doth it:

An active versatile agent, untiring in the principle of energy,

Nor space, nor time, nor rest, nor toil, can affect the tenant of the brain;

His dwelling may verily be shattered, and the furniture thereof be disarranged,

But the particle of Deity in man slumbereth not, neither can be wearied:

However swift to change, even as the field of a kaleidoscope,

It taketh in but one idea at once, moulded for the moment to its likeness:

Mind is as the quicksilver, which, poured from vessel to vessel,

Instantly seizeth on a shape, and as instantly again discardeth it;

For it is an apprehensive power, closing on the properties of Matter,

Expanding to enwrap a world, collapsing to prison up an atom:

As, by night, thine irritable eyes may have seen strange changing figures,

Now a wheel, now suddenly a point, a line, a curve, a zigzag,

A maze ever altering, as the dance of gnats upon a sunbeam,

Swift, intricate, neither to be prophesied, nor to be remembered in succession,

So, the mind of a man, single, and perpetually moving,

Flickereth about from thought to thought, changed with each idea;

For the passing second metamorphosed to the image of that within its ken,

And throwing its immediate perceptions into each cause of contemplation.

It shall regard a tree; and unconsciously, in separate review,

Embrace its colour, shape, and use, whole and individual conceptions;

It shall read or hear of crime, and cast itself into the commission;

It shall note a generous deed, and glow for a moment as the doer;

It shall imagine pride or pleasure, treading on the edges of temptation;

Or heed of God and of His Christ, and grow transformed to glory.

Therefore, it is wise and well to guide the mind aright,

That its aptness may be sensitive to good, and shrink with antipathy from evil:

For use will mould and mark it, or nonusage dull and blunt it;—

So to talk of spirit by analogy with substance;

And analogy is a truer guide, than many teachers tell of,

Similitudes are scattered round, to help us, not to hurt us;

Moses, in his every type, and the Greater than Moses, in His parables,

Preach, in terms that all may learn, the philosophic lessons of analogy:

And here, in a topic immaterial, the likeness of analogy is just;

By habits, knit the nerves of mind, and train the gladiator shrewdly:

For thought shall strengthen thinking, and imagery speed imagination,

Until thy spiritual inmate shall have swelled to the giant of Otranto.

Nevertheless, heed well, that this Athlete, growing in thy brain,

Be a wholesome Genius, not a cursed Afrite:

And see thou discipline his strength, and point his aim discreetly;

Feed him on humility and holy things, weaned from covetous desires;

Hour by hour and day by day, ply him with ideas of excellence,

Dragging forth the evil but to loathe, as a Spartan's drunken Helot:

And win, by gradual allurements, the still expanding soul,

To rise from a contemplated universe, even to the Hand that made it.

A common mind perceiveth not beyond his eyes and ears:

The palings of the park of sense enthral this captured roebuck:

And still, though fettered in the flesh, he doth not feel his chains,

Externals are the world to him, and circumstance his atmosphere.

Therefore tangible pleasures are enough for the animal man;

He is swift to speak and slow to think, dreading his own dim conscience;

And solitude is terrible, and exile worse than death,

He cannot dwell apart, nor breathe at a distance from the crowd.

But minds of nobler stamp, and chiefest the mint-marked of heaven,

Walk independent, by themselves, freely manumitted of externals:

They carry viands with them, and need no refreshment by the way,

Nor drink of other wells than their own inner fountain.

Strange shall it seem how little such a man will lean upon the accidents of life,

He is winged and needeth not a staff; if it break, he shall not fall:

And lightly perchance doth he remember the stale trivialities around him,

He liveth in the realm of thought, beyond the world of things;

These are but transient Matter, and himself enduring Spirit:

And worldliness will laugh to scorn that sublimated wisdom.

His eyes may open on a prison-cell, but the bare walls glow with imagery;

His ears may be filled with execration, but are listening to the music of sweet thoughts;

He may dwell in a hovel with a hero's heart, and canopy his penury with peace,

For mind is a kingdom to the man, who gathereth his pleasure from Ideas.

OF NAMES.

Adam gave the name, when the Lord had made His creature,

For God led them in review, to see what man would call them.

As they struck his senses, he proclaimed their sounds,

A name for the distinguishing of each, a numeral by which it should be known:

He specified the partridge by her cry, and the forest prowler by his roaring,

The tree by its use, and the flower by its beauty, and everything according to its truth.

There is an arbitrary name; whereunto the idea attacheth;

And there is a reasonable name, linking its fitness to idea:

Yet shall these twain run in parallel courses,

Neither shall thou readily discern the habit from the nature.

For mind is apt and quick to wed ideas and names together,

Nor stoppeth its perception to be curious of priorities;

And there is but little in the sound, as some have vainly fancied,

The same tone in different tongues shall be suitable to opposite ideas:

Yea, take an ensample in thine own; consider similar words:

How various and contrary the thoughts those kindred names produce:

A house shall seem a fitting word to call a roomy dwelling,

Yet there is a like propriety in the small smooth sound, a mouse:

Mountain, as if of a necessity, is a word both mighty and majestic,—

What heed ye then of Fountain?—flowing silver in the sun.

Many a fair flower is burdened with preposterous appellatives,

Which the wiser simplicity of rustics entitled by its beauties;

And often the conceit of science, loving to be thought cosmopolite,

Shall mingle names of every clime, alike obscure to each.

There is wisdom in calling a thing fitly; name should note particulars

Through a character obvious to all men, and worthy of their instant acceptation.

The herbalist had a simple cause for every word upon his catalogue,

But now the mouth of Botany is filled with empty sound;

And many a peasant hath an answer on his tongue, concerning some vexed flower,

Shrewder than the centipede phrase, wherewithal philosophers invest it.

For that, the foolishness of pride, and flatteries of cringing homage,

Strew with chaff the threshing-floors of science; names perplex them all:

The entomologist, who hath pried upon an insect, straightway shall endow it with his name;

It had many qualities and marks of note,—but in chief, a vain observer:

The geographer shall journey to the pole, through biting frost and desolation,

And, for some simple patron's sake, shall name that land, the happy:

The fossilist hath found a bone, the rib of some huge lizard,

And forthwith standeth to it sponsor, to tack himself on reptile immortalities:

The sportsman, hunting at the Cape, found some strange-horned antelope,

The spots are new, the fame is cheap, and so his name is added.

Thus, obscurities encumber knowledge, even by the vanity of men

Who play into each other's hand the game of giving names.

Various are the names of men, and drawn from different wells;

Aspects of body, or characters of mind, the creature's first idea:

And some have sprung of trades, and some of dignities or office;

Other some added to a father's, and yet more growing from a place:

Animal creation, with sciences, and things,—their composites, and near associations,

Contributed their symbollings of old, wherewith to title men:

And heraldry set upon its cresture the figured attributes as ensigns

By which, as by a name concrete, its bearer should be known.

Egypt opened on the theme, dressing up her gods in qualities;

Horns of power, feathers of the swift, mitres of catholic dominion,

The sovereign asp, the circle everlasting, the crook and thong of justice,

By many mystic shapes and sounds displayed the idol's name.

Thereafter, high-plumed warriors, the chieftains of Etruria and Troy,

And Xerxes, urging on his millions to the tomb of pride, ThermopylÆ,

And Hiero with his bounding ships, all figured at the prow,

And Rome's PrÆtorian standards, piled with strange devices,

And stout crusaders pressing to the battle, clad in sable mail;

These all in their speaking symbols, earned, or wore, a name.

Eve; the mother of all living, and Abraham, father of a multitude,

Jacob, the supplanter, and David, the beloved, and all the worthies of old time,

Noah, who came for consolation, and Benoni, son of sorrow,

Kings and prophets, children of the East, owned each his title of significance.

There be names of high descent, and thereby storied honours;

Names of fair renown, and therein characters of merit:

But to lend the lowborn noble names, is to shed upon them ridicule and evil;

Yea, many weeds run rank in pride, if men have dubbed them cedars.

And to herald common mediocrity with the noisy notes of fame,

Tendeth to its deeper scorn; as if it were to call the mole a mammoth.

Yet shall ye find the trader's babe dignified with sounding titles,

And little hath the father guessed the harm he did his child:

For either may they breed him discontent, a peevish repining at his station,

Or point the finger of despite at the mule in the trappings of an elephant:

And it is a kind of theft to filch appellations from the famous,

A soiling of the shrines of praise with folly's vulgar herd.

Prudence hath often gone ashamed for the name they added to his father's,

If minds of mark and great achievements bore it well before;

For he walketh as the jay in the fable, though not by his own folly,

Another's fault hath compassed his misfortune, making him a martyr to his name.

Who would call the tench a whale, or style a torch, Orion?

Yet many a silly parent hath dealt likewise with his nurseling.

Give thy child a fit distinguishment, making him sole tenant of a name,

For it were a sore hindrance to hold it in common with a hundred:

In the Babel of confused identities fame is little feasible,

The felon shall detract from the philanthropist, and the sage share honours with the simple:

Still, in thy title of distinguishment, fall not into arrogant assumption,

Steering from caprice and affectations; and for all thou doest, have a reason.

He that is ambitious for his son, should give him untried names,

For those that have served other men, haply may injure by their evils;

Or otherwise may hinder by their glories; therefore, set him by himself,

To win for his individual name some clear specific praise.

There were nine Homers, all goodly sons of song, but where is any record of the eight?

One grew to fame, an Aaron's rod, and swallowed up his brethren:

Who knoweth? more distinctly titled, those dead eight had lived;

But the censers were ranged in a circle to mingle their sweets without a difference.

Art thou named of a common crowd, and sensible of high aspirings?

It is hard for thee to rise,—yet strive: thou mayest be among them a MusÆus.

Art thou named of a family, the same in successive generations?

It is open to thee still to earn for epithets, such an one, the good or great.

Art thou named foolishly? Show that thou art wiser than thy fathers;

Live to shame their vanity or sin by dutiful devotion to thy sphere.

Art thou named discreetly? It is well, the course is free;

No competitor shall claim thy colours, neither fix his faults upon thee:

Hasten to the goal of fame between the posts of duty,

And win a blessing from the world, that men may love thy name:

Yea, that the unction of its praise, in fragrance well deserving,

May float adown the stream of time, like ambergris at sea;

So thy sons may tell their sons, and those may teach their children,

He died in goodness, as he lived;—and left us his good name.

And more than these: there is a roll whereon thy name is written;

See that, in the Book of Doom, that name is fixed in light:

Then, safe within a better home, where time and its titles are not found,

God will give thee His new Name, and write it on thy heart:

A Name better than of sons, a Name dearer than of daughters,

A Name of union, peace, and praise, as numbered in thy God.

OF THINGS.

Taken separately from all substance, and flying with the feathered flock of thoughts,

The idea of a thing hath the nature of its Soul, a separate seeming essence:

Intimately linked to the idea, suggesting many qualities,

The name of a thing hath the nature of its Mind, an intellectual recorder:

And the matter of a thing, concrete, is a Body to the perfect creature,

Compacted three in one, as all things else within the universe.

Nothing canst thou add to them, and nothing take away, for all have these proportions,

The thought, the word, the form, combining in the Thing:

All separate, yet harmonizing well, and mingled each with other,

One whole in several parts, yet each part spreading to a whole:

The idea is a whole; and the meaning phrase that spake idea, a whole;

And the matter, as ye see it, is a whole; the mystery of true triunity:

Yea, there is even a deeper mystery,—which none, I wot, can fathom,

Matter, different from properties whereby the solid substance is described;

For, size and weight, cohesion and the like, live distinct from matter,

Yet who can imagine matter, unendowed with size and weight?

As in the spiritual, so in the material, man must rest with patience,

And wait for other eyes wherewith to read the books of God.

Men have talked learnedly of atoms, as if matter could be ever indivisible;

They talk, but ill are skilled to teach, and darken truth by fancies:

An atom by our grosser sense was never yet conceived,

And nothing can be thought so small, as not to be divided:

For an atom runneth to infinity, and never shall be caught in space,

And a molecule is no more indivisible than Saturn's belted orb.

Things intangible, multiplied by multitudes, never will amass to substance,

Neither can a thing which may be touched, be made of impalpable proportions;

The sum of indivisibles must needs be indivisible, as adding many nothings,

And the building up of atoms into matter is but a silly sophism;

Lucretius, and keen Anaximander, and many that have followed in their thoughts,

(For error hath a long black shadow, dimming light for ages,)

In the foolishness of men without a God fancied to fashion Matter

Of intangibles, and therefore uncohering, indivisibles, and therefore Spirit.

Things breed thoughts; therefore at Thebes and Heliopolis,

In hieroglyphic sculptures are the priestly secrets written:

Things breed thoughts; therefore was the Athens of idolatry

Set with carved images, frequent as the trees of Academus:

Things breed thoughts; therefore the Brahmin and the Burman

With mythologic shapes adorn their coarse pantheon:

Things breed thoughts; therefore the statue and the picture,

Relics, rosaries, and miracles in act, quicken the Papist in his worship:

Things breed thoughts; therefore the lovers at their parting,

Interchanged with tearful smiles the dear reminding tokens:

Things breed thoughts; therefore when the clansman met his foe,

The bloodstained claymore in his hand revived the memories of vengeance.

Things teach with double force; through the animal eye, and through the mind,

And the eye catcheth in an instant, what the ear shall not learn within an hour.

Thence is the potency of travel, the precious might of its advantages

To compensate its dissipative harm, its toil and cost and danger.

Ulysses, wandering to many shores, lived in many cities,

And thereby learnt the minds of men, and stored his own more richly:

Herodotus, the accurate and kindly, spake of that he saw,

And reaped his knowledge on the spot, in fertile fields of Egypt:

Lycurgus culled from every clime the golden fruits of justice;

And Plato roamed through foreign lands, to feed on truth in all.

For travel, conversant with Things, bringeth them in contact with the mind;

We breathe the wholesome atmosphere about ungarbled truth:

Pictures of fact are painted on the eye, to decorate the house of intellect,

Rather than visions of fancy, filling all the chambers with a vapour.

For, in Ideas, the great mind will exaggerate, and the lesser extenuate truth;

But in Things the one is chastened, and the other quickened, to equality:

And in Names,—though a property be told, rather than some arbitrary accident,

Still shall the thought be vague or false, if none have seen the Thing:

For in Things the property with accident standeth in a mass concrete,

These cannot cheat the sense, nor elude the vigilance of spirit.

Travel is a ceaseless fount of surface education,

But its wisdom will be simply superficial, if thou add not thoughts to things:

Yet, aided by the varnish of society, things may serve for thoughts,

Till many dullards that have seen the world shall pass for scholars:

Because one single glance will conquer all descriptions,

Though graphic, these left some unsaid, though true, these tended to some error;

And the most witless eye that saw, had a juster notion of its object,

Than the shrewdest mind that heard and shaped its gathered thoughts of Things.

OF FAITH.

Confidence was bearer of the palm; for it looked like conviction of desert:

And where the strong is well assured, the weaker soon allow it.

Majesty and Beauty are commingled, in moving with immutable decision,

And well may charm the coward hearts that turn and hide for fear.

Faith, firmness, confidence, consistency,—these are well allied;

Yea, let a man press on in aught, he shall not lack of honour:

For such an one seemeth as superior to the native instability of creatures;

That he doeth, he doeth as a god, and men will marvel at his courage.

Even in crimes, a partial praise cannot be denied to daring,

And many fearless chiefs have won the friendship of a foe.

Confidence is conqueror of men; victorious both over them and in them;

The iron will of one stout heart shall make a thousand quail:

A feeble dwarf, dauntlessly resolved, will turn the tide of battle,

And rally to a nobler strife the giants that had fled;

The tenderest child, unconscious of a fear, will shame the man to danger,

And when he dared it, danger died, and faith had vanquished fear.

Boldness is akin to power: yea, because ignorance is weakness,

Knowledge with unshrinking might will nerve the vigorous hand:

Boldness hath a startling strength; the mouse may fright a lion,

And oftentimes the horned herd is scared by some brave cur.

Courage hath analogy with faith, for it standeth both in animal and moral;

The true is mindful of a God, the false is stout in self:

But true or false, the twain are faith; and faith worketh wonders:

Never was a marvel done upon the earth, but it had sprung of faith:

Nothing noble, generous, or great, but faith was the root of the achievement;

Nothing comely, nothing famous, but its praise is faith.

Leonidas fought in human faith, as Joshua in divine:

Xenophon trusted to his skill, and the sons of Mattathias to their cause:

In faith Columbus found a path across those untried waters;

The heroines of Arc and Saragossa fought in earthly faith:

Tell was strong, and Alfred great, and Luther wise, by faith;

Margaret by faith was valiant for her son, and Wallace mighty for his people:

Faith in his reason made Socrates sublime, as faith in his science, Galileo:

Ambassadors in faith are bold, and unreproved for boldness:

Faith urged Fabius to delays, and sent forth Hannibal to CannÆ:

CÆsar at the Rubicon, Miltiades at Marathon; both were sped by faith.

I set not all in equal spheres: I number not the martyr with the patriot;

I class not the hero with his horse, because the twain have courage;

But only for ensample and instruction, that all things stand by faith;

Albeit faith of divers kinds, and varying in degree.

There is a faith towards men, and there is a faith towards God;

The latter is the gold and the former is the brass; but both are sturdy metal:

And the brass mingled with the gold floweth into rich Corinthian;

A substance bright and hard and keen, to point Achilles' spear:

So shall thou stop the way against the foes that hem thee;

Trust in God to strengthen man;—be bold, for He doth help.

Yet more: for confidence in man, even to the worst and meanest,

Hath power to overcome his ill, by charitable good.

Fling thine unreserving trust even on the conscience of a culprit,

Soon wilt thou shame him by thy faith, and he will melt and mend:

The nest of thieves will harm thee not, if thou dost bear thee boldly;

Boldly, yea and kindly, as relying on their honour:

For the hand so stout against aggression, is quite disarmed by charity;

And that warm sun will thaw the heart case-hardened by long frost.

Treat men gently, trust them strongly, if thou wish their weal;

Or cautious doubt and bitter thoughts will tempt the best to foil thee.

Believe the well in sanguine hope, and thou shall reap the better;

But if thou deal with men so ill, thy dealings make them worse;

Despair not of some gleams of good still lingering in the darkest,

And among veterans in crime, plead thou as with their children:

So, astonied at humanities, the bad heart long estranged,

Shall even weep to feel himself so little worth thy love;

In wholesome sorrow will he bless thee; yea, and in that spirit may repent;

Thus wilt thou gain a soul, in mercy given to thy Faith.

Look aside to lack of faith, the mass of ills it bringeth:

All things treacherous, base, and vile, dissolving the brotherhood of men.

Bonds break; the cement hath lost its hold; and each is separate from other;

That which should be neighbourly and good, is cankered into bitterness and evil.

O thou serpent, fell Suspicion, coiling coldly round the heart,—

O thou asp of subtle Jealousy, stinging hotly to the soul,—

O distrust, reserve, and doubt,—what reptile shapes are here,

Poisoning the garden of a world with death among its flowers!

No need of many words, the tale is easy to be told;

A point will touch the truth, a line suggest the picture.

For if, in thine own home, a cautious man and captious,

Thou hintest at suspicion of a servant, thou soon wilt make a thief;

Or if, too keen in care, thou dost evidently disbelieve thy child,

Thou hast injured the texture of his honour, and smoothed to him the way of lying:

Or if thou observest upon friends, as seeking thee selfishly for interest,

Thou hast hurt their kindliness to thee, and shalt be paid with scorn;

Or if, O silly ones of marriage, your foul and foolish thoughts,

Harshly misinterpreting in each the levity of innocence for sin,

Shall pour upon the lap of home pain where once was pleasure,

And mix contentions in the cup, that mantled once with comforts,

Bitterly and justly shall ye rue the punishment due to unbelief;

Ye trust not each the other, nor the mutual vows of God;

Take heed, for the pit may now be near, a pit of your own digging,—

Faith abused tempteth unto crime, and doubt may make its monster.

Man verily is vile, but more in capability than action;

His sinfulness is deep, but his transgressions may be few, even from the absence of temptation:

He is hanging in a gulf midway, but the air is breathable about him:

Thrust him not from that slight hold, to perish in the vapours underneath.

For, God pleadeth with the deaf, as having ears to hear,

Christ speaketh to the dead, as those that are capable of living;

And an evil teacher is that man, a tempter to much sin,

Who looketh on his hearers with distrust, and hath no confidence in brethren.

All may mend; and sympathies are healing: and reason hath its influence with the worst;

And in those worst is ample hope, if only thou hast charity, and faith.

Somewhiles have I watched a man exchanging the sobriety of faith,

Old lamps for new,—even for fanatical excitements.

He gained surface, but lost solidity; heat, in lieu of health;

And still with swelling words and thoughts he scorned his ancient coldness:

But, his strength was shorn as Samson's; he walked he knew not whither;

Doubt was on his daily path; and duties shewed not certain:

Until, in an hour of enthusiasm, stung with secret fears,

He pinned the safety of his soul on some false prophet's sleeve.

And then, that sure word failed; and with it, failed his faith;

It failed, and fell; O deep and dreadful was his fall in faith!

He could not stop, with reason's rein, his coursers on the slope,

And so they dashed him down the cliff of hardened unbelief.

With overreaching grasp he had strained for visionary treasures,

But a fiend had cheated his presumption, and hurled him to despair.

So he lay in his blood, the victim of a credulous false faith,

And many nights, and night-like days, he dwelt in outer darkness.

But, within a while, his variable mind caught a new impression,

A new impression of the good old stamp, that sealed him when a child:

He was softened, and abjured his infidelity; he was wiser, and despised his credulity;

And turned again to simple faith more simply than before.

Experience had declared too well his mind was built of water,

And so, renouncing strength in self, he fixed his faith in God.

It is not for me to stipulate for creeds; Bible, Church, and Reason,

These three shall lead the mind, if any can, to truth.

But I must stipulate for faith: both God and man demand it:

Trust is great in either world, if any would be well.

Verily, the sceptical propensity is an universal foe;

Sneering Pyrrho never found, nor cared to find, a friend:

How could he trust another? and himself, whom would he not deceive?

His proper gains were all his aim, and interests clash with kindness.

So, the Bedouin goeth armed, an enemy to all,

The spear is stuck beside his couch, the dagger hid beneath his pillow.

For society, void of mutual trust, of credit, and of faith,

Would fall asunder as a waterspout, snapped from the cloud's attraction.

Faith may rise into miracles of might, as some few wise have shown:

Faith may sink into credulities of weakness, as the mass of fools have witnessed.

Therefore, in the first, saints and martyrs have fulfilled their mission,

Conquering dangers, courting deaths, and triumphing in all.

Therefore, in the last, the magician and the witch, victims of their own delusion,

Have gained the bitter wages of impracticable sins.

They believed in allegiance with Satan; they worked in that belief,

And thereby earned the loss and harm of guilt that might not be.

For, faith hath two hands; with the one it addeth virtue to indifferents;

Yea, it sanctified a Judith and a Jael, for what otherwise were treachery and murder:

With the other hand it heapeth crime even on impossibles or simples,

And many a wizard well deserved the faggot for his faith:

He trusted in his intercourse with evil, he sacrificed heartily to fiends,

He withered up with curses to the limit of his will, and was vile, because he thought himself a villain.

A great mind is ready to believe, for he hungereth to feed on facts,

And the gnawing stomach of his ignorance craveth unceasing to be filled:

A little mind is boastful and incredulous, for he fancieth all knowledge is his own,

So will he cavil at a truth; how should it be true, and he not know it?—

There is an easy scheme, to solve all riddles by the sensual,

And thus, despising mysteries, to feel the more sufficient;

For it comforteth the foul hard heart, to reject the pure unseen,

And relieveth the dull soft head, to hinder one from gazing upon vacancy.

True wisdom, labouring to expound, heareth others readily;

False wisdom, sturdy to deny, closeth up her mind to argument.

The sum of certainties is found so small, their field so wide an universe,

That many things may truly be, which man hath not conceived:

The characters revealed of God are a strong mind's sole assurance

That any strangeness may not stand a sober theme for faith.

Ignorance being light denied, this ought to show the stronger in its view,

But ignorance is commonly a double negative, both of light and morals:

So, adding vanity to blindness, for ease, it taketh refuge in a doubt,

And aching soon with ceaseless doubt, it finisheth the strife by misbelieving.

Faith, by its very nature, shall embrace both credence and obedience:

Yea, the word for both is one, and cannot be divided.

For, work void of faith, wherein can it be counted for a duty;

And faith not seen in work,—whereby can the doctrine be discovered?

Faith in religion is an instrument; a handle, and the hand to turn it:

Less a condition than a mean, and more an operation than a virtue.

A moral sickness, like to sin, must have a moral cure;

And faith alone can heal the mind, whose malady is sense.

Ye are told of God's deep love: they that believe will love Him:

They that love Him, will obey: and obedience hath its blessing.

Ye are taught of the soul's great price; they that believe will prize it,

And, prizing soul, will cherish well the hopes that make it happy.

Effects spring from feelings; and feelings grow of faith:

If a man conceive himself insulted, will not his anger smite?

Thus, let a soul believe his state, his danger, destiny, redemption,

Will he not feel eager to be safe, like him that kept the prison at Philippi?

A mother had an only son, and sent him out to sea:

She was a widow, and in penury; and he must seek his fortunes.

How often in the wintry nights, when waves and winds were howling,

Her heart was torn with sickening dread, and bled to see her boy.

And on one sunny morn, when all around was comfort,

News came, that weeks agone, the vessel had been wrecked;

Yea, wrecked, and he was dead! they had seen him perish in his agony:

Oh then, what agony was like to her's,—for she believed the tale.

She was bowed and broken down with sorrow, and uncomforted in prayer;

Many nights she mourned, and pined, and had no hope but death.

But on a day, while sorely she was weeping, a stranger broke upon her loneliness,—

He had news to tell, that weather-beaten man, and must not be denied:

And what were the wonder-working words that made this mourner joyous,

That swept her heaviness away, and filled her world with praise?

Her son was saved,—is alive,—is near!—O did she stop to question?

No, rushing in the force of faith, she met him at the door!

OF HONESTY.

All is vanity that is not honesty;—thus is it graven on the tomb:

And there is no wisdom but in piety;—so the dead man preacheth:

For, in a simple village church, among those classic shades

Which sylvan Evelyn loved to rear, (his praise, and my delight,)

These, the words of truth, are writ upon his sepulchre

Who learnt much lore, and knew all trees, from the cedar to the hyssop on the wall.

A just conjunction, godliness and honesty; ministering to both worlds,

Well wed, and ill to be divided, a pair that God hath joined together.

I touch not now the vulgar thought, as of tricks and cheateries in trade;

I speak of honest purpose, character, speech and action.

For an honest man hath special need of charity, and prudence,

Of a deep and humbling self-acquaintance, and of blessed commerce with his God,

So that the keennesses of truth may be freed from asperities of censure,

And the just but vacillating mind be not made the pendulum of arguments:

For a false reason, shrewdly put, can often not be answered on the instant,

And prudence looketh unto faith, content to wait solutions;

Yea, it looketh, yea, it waiteth, still holding honesty in leash,

Lest, as a hot young hound, it track not game, but vermin.

Many a man of honest heart, but ignorant of self and God,

Hath followed the marsh-fires of pestilence, esteeming them the lights of truth;

He heard a cause, which he had not skill to solve,—and so received it gladly;

And that cause brought its consequence, of harm to an unstable soul.

Prudence, for a man's own sake, never should be separate from honesty;

And charity, for other's good, and his, must still be joined therewith:

For the harshly chiding tongue hath neither pleasuring nor profit,

And the cold unsympathizing heart never gained a good.

Sin is a sore, and folly is a fever; touch them tenderly for healing;

The bad chirurgeon's awkward knife harmeth, spite of honesty.

Still, a rough diamond is better than the polished paste,—

That courteous flattering fool, who spake of vice as virtue:

And honesty, even by itself, though making many adversaries

Whom prudence might have set aside, or charity have softened,

Evermore will prosper at the last, and gain a man great honour

By giving others many goods, to his own cost and hindrance.

Freedom is father of the honest, and sturdy Independence is his brother;

These three, with heart and hand, dwell together in unity.

The blunt yeoman, stout and true, will speak unto princes unabashed:

His mind is loyal, just and free, a crystal in its plain integrity;

What should make such an one ashamed? where courtiers kneel, he standeth;—

I will indeed bow before the king, but knees were knit for God.

And many such there be, of a high and noble conscience,

Honourable, generous, and kind, though blest with little light:

What should he barter for his Freedom? some petty gain of gold?

Free of speech, and free in act, magnates honour him for boldness:

Long may he flourish in his peace, and a stalwarth race around him,

Rooted in the soil like oaks, and hardy as the pine upon the mountains!

Yet, there be others, that will truckle to a lie, selling honesty for interest:

And do they gain?—they gain but loss; a little cash, with scorn.

Behold, the sorrowful change wrought upon a fallen nature:

He hath lost his own esteem, and other men's respect;

For the buoyancy of upright faith, he is clothed in the heaviness of cringing;

For plain truth where none could err, he hath chosen tortuous paths;

In lieu of his majesty of countenance—the timorous glances of servility;

Instead of Freedom's honest pride,—the spirit of a slave.

Nevertheless, there is something to be pleaded, even for a necessary guile,

Whilst the world, and all that is therein, lieth deep in evil.

Who can be altogether honest,—a champion never out of mail,

Ready to break a lance for truth with every crowding error?

Who can be altogether honest,—dragging out the secresies of life,

And risking to be lashed and loathed for each unkind disclosure?

Who can be altogether honest,—living in perpetual contentions,

And prying out the petty cheats that swell the social scheme?

For he must speak his instant mind,—a mind corrupt and sinful,

Exhibiting to other men's disgust its undisguised deformities:

He must utter all the hatred of his heart, and add to it the venom of his tongue;

Shall he feel, and hide his feelings? that were the meanness of a hypocrite:—

Still, O man, such hypocrisy is better, than this bold honesty to sin:

Kill the feeling, or conceal it: let shame at least do the work of charity.

O charity, thou livest not in warnings, meddling among men,

Rebuking every foolish word, and censuring small sins;

This is not thy secret,—rather wilt thou hide their multitude,

And silence the condemning tongue, and wearisome exhortation.

But for thee, thy strength and zeal shine in encouragement to good,

Lifting up the lantern of ensample, that wanderers may find the way:

That lantern is not lit to gaze on all the hatefulness of evil,

But set on high for life and light, the loveliness of good.

The hard censorious mind sitteth as a keen anatomist

Tracking up the fibres in corruption, and prying on a fearful corpse:

But the charitable soul is a young lover, enamoured little wisely,

That saw no fault in her he loved, and sought to see one less;

So, in his kind and genial light, she grew more worthy of his love;

Won to good by gentle suns, and not by frowning tempest.

Verily, infirm thyself,—be slow to chide a brother's imperfections;

For many times the decent veil must hang on faults of nature:

And the rude hands, that rend it, offend against the modesty of right,

While seeming zeal, and its effort to do good, is only feigned self-praise:

Often will the meannesses of life, hidden away in corners,

Prove wisdom; and the generous is glad to leave them unregarded in the shade.

The follies none are found to praise, let them die unblamed;

Thine honest strife will only tend to make some think them wise:

And small conventional deceits, let them live uncensured:

Or if thou war with pigmies, thou shalt haply help the cranes.

Where to be blind was safety, Ovid had been wise for winking:

And when a tell-tale might do harm, be sure it is prudent to be dumb;

That which is just and fit is often found combating with honesty:

In the cause of good, be wise; and in a case indifferent, keep silence.

Let honesty's unblushing face be shaded by the mantle of humility,

So shall it shine a lamp of love, and not the torch of strife:

Otherwise the lantern of Diogenes, presumptuously thrust before the face,

If it never find an honest man, shall often make an angered.

Let honesty be companied by charity of heart, lest it walk unwelcome;

Or the mouthing censor of others and himself, soon shall sink to scorn.

Let honesty be added unto innocence of life: then a man may only be its martyr;

But if openness of speech be found with secresy of guilt, the martyr will be seen a malefactor.

There is a cunning scheme, to put on surface bluntness,

And cover still deep water, with the clamorous ripples of a shallow.

For a man, to gain his selfish ends, will make a stalking-horse of honesty;

And hide his poaching limbs behind, that he may cheat the quicker.

Such an one is loud and ostentatious, full of oaths for argument,

Boastful of honour and sincerity, and not to be put down by facts:

He is obstinate, and sheweth it for firmness; he is rude, displaying it for truth;

And glorieth in doggedness of temper, as if it were uncompromising justice.

Be aware of such a man; his brawling covereth designs;

This specious show of honesty cometh as the herald of a thief:

His feint is made with awkward clashing on the buckler's boss,

But meanwhile doth his secret skill ensure its fatal aim.

This is the hypocrite of honesty; ye may know him by an overacted part;

Taking pains to turn and twist, where other men walk straight;

Or walking straight, he will not step aside to let another pass,

But roughly pusheth on, provoking opposition on the way;

He is full of disquietude for calmness, full of intriguing for simplicity,

Valorous with those who cannot fight, and humble to the brave:

Where brotherly advice were good, this man rudely blameth,

And on some small occasion, flattereth with coarse praise.

The craven in a lion's skin hath conquered by his character for courage;

Sheep's clothing helped the wolf, till he slew by his character for kindness.

For honesty hath many gains, and well the wise have known

This will prosper to the end, and fill their house with gold.

The phosphorus of cheatery will fade, and all its profits perish,

While honesty with growing light endureth as the moon.

Yea, it would be wise in a world of thieves, where cheating were a virtue,

To dare the vice of honesty, if any would be rich.

For that which by the laws of God is heightened into duty,

Ever, in the practice of a man, will be seen both policy and privilege.

Thank God, ye toilers for your bread, in that, daily labouring,

He hath suffered the bubbles of self-interest to float upon the stream of duty:

For honesty, of every kind, approved by God and man,

Of wealth and better weal is found the richest cornucopia.

Tempered by humbleness and charity, honesty of speech hath honour;

And mingled well with prudence, honesty of purpose hath its praise:

Trust payeth homage unto truth, rewarding honesty of action:

And all men love to lean on him, who never failed nor fainted.

Freedom gloweth in his eyes, and Nobleness of nature at his heart,

And Independence took a crown and fixed it on his head:

So, he stood in his integrity, just and firm of purpose,

Aiding many, fearing none, a spectacle to angels, and to men:

Yea,—when the shattered globe shall rock in the throes of dissolution,

Still, will he stand in his integrity, sublime—an honest man.

OF SOCIETY.

Better is the mass of men, Suspicion, than thy fears,

Kinder than thy thoughts, O chilling heart of Prudence,

Purer than thy judgments, ascetic tongue of Censure,

In all things worthier to love, if not also wiser to esteem.

Yea, let the moralist condemn, there be large extenuations of his verdict,

Let the misanthrope shun men and abjure, the most are rather loveable than hateful.

How many pleasant faces shed their light on every side,

How many angels unawares have crossed thy casual way!

How often, in thy journeyings, hast thou made thee instant friends,

Found, to be loved a little while, and lost, to meet no more;

Friends of happy reminiscence, although so transient in their converse,

Liberal, cheerful, and sincere, a crowd of kindly traits.

I have sped by land and sea, and mingled with much people,

But never yet could find a spot, unsunned by human kindness;

Some more, and some less,—but truly all can claim a little;

And a man may travel through the world, and sow it thick with friendships.

There be indeed, to say it in all sorrow, bad apostate souls,

Deserted of their ministering angels, and given up to liberty of sin,—

And other some, the miserly and mean, whose eyes are keen and greedy,

With stony hearts, and iron fists, to filch and scrape and clutch,—

And others yet again, the coarse in mind, selfish, sensual, brutish,

Seeming as incapable of softer thoughts, and dead to better deeds;

Such, no lover of the good, no follower of the generous and gentle,

Can nearer grow to love, than may consist with pity.

Few verily are these among the mass, and cast in fouler moulds,

Few and poor in friends, and well-deserving of their poverty:

Yet, or ever thou hast harshly judged, and linked their presence to disgust,

Consider well the thousand things that made them all they are.

Thou hast not thought upon the causes, ranged in consecutive necessity,

Which tended long to these effects, with sure constraining power.

For each of those unlovely ones, if thou couldst hear his story,

Hath much to urge of just excuse, at least as men count justice:

Foolish education, thwarted opportunities, natural propensities unchecked,—

Thus were they discouraged from all good, and pampered in their evil;

And, if thou wilt apprehend them well, tenderly looking on temptations,

Bearing the base indulgently, and liberally dealing with the froward,

Thou shalt discern a few fair fruits even upon trees so withered,

Thou shalt understand how some may praise, and some be found to love them.

Nevertheless for these, my counsel is, Avoid them if thou canst;

For the finer edges of thy virtues will be dulled by attrition with their vice.

And there is an enemy within thee; either to palliate their sin,

Until, for surface-sweetness, thou too art drawn adown the vortex;

Or, even unto fatal pride, to glorify thy purity by contrast,

Until the publican and harlot stand nearer heaven than the Pharisee:

Or daily strife against their ill, in subtleness may irritate thy soul,

And in that struggle thou shall fail, even through infirmity of goodness;

Or, callous by continuance of injuries, thou wilt cease to pardon,

Cease to feel, and cease to care, a cold case-hardened man.

Beware of their example,—and thine own; beware the hazards of the battle;

But chiefly be thou ware of this, an unforgiving spirit.

Many are the dangers and temptations compassing a bad man's presence;

The upas hath a poisonous shade, and who would slumber there?

Wherefore, avoid them if thou canst; only, under providence and duty,

If thy lot be cast with Kedar, patiently and silently live to their rebuke.

How beautiful thy feet, and full of grace thy coming,

O better kind companion, that art well for either world!

There is an atmosphere of happiness floating round that man,

Love is throned upon his heart, and light is found within his dwelling:

His eyes are rayed with peacefulness, and wisdom waiteth on his tongue;

Seek him out, cherish him well, walking in the halo of his influence:

For he shall be fragrance to thy soul, as a garden of sweet lilies,

Hedged and apart from the outer world, an island of the blest among the seas.

There is an outer world, and there is an inner centre;

And many varying rings concentric round the self.

For, first, about a man,—after his communion with Heaven,—

Is found the helpmate even as himself, the wife of his vows and his affections:

See then that ye love in faith, scorning petty jealousies,

For Satan spoileth too much love, by souring it with doubts;

See that intimacy die not to indifference, nor anxiety sink into moroseness,

And tend ye well the mutual minds bound in a copartnership for life.

Next of those concentric circles, radiating widely in circumference,

Wheel in wheel, and world in world,—come the band of children:

A tender nest of soft young hearts, each to be separately studied,

A curious eager flock of minds, to be severally tamed and tutored.

And a man, blest with these, hath made his own society,

He is independent of the world, hanging on his friends more loosely:

For the little faces round his hearth are friends enow for him,

If he seek others, it is for sake of these, and less for his own pleasure.

What companionship so sweet, yea, who can teach so well

As these pure budding intellects, and bright unsullied hearts?

What voice so musical as theirs, what visions of elegance so comely,

What thoughts and hopes and holy prayers, can others cause like these?

If ye count society for pastime,—what happier recreation than a nurseling,

Its winning ways, its prattling tongue, its innocence and mirth?

If ye count society for good,—how fair a field is here,

To guide these souls to God, and multiply thyself for heaven!

And this sweet social commerce with thy children groweth as their growth,

Unless thou fail of duty, or have weaned them by thine absence.

Keep them near thee, rear them well, guide, correct, instruct them;

And be the playmate of their games, the judge in their complainings.

So shall the maiden and the youth love thee as their sympathizing friend,

And bring their joys to share with thee, their sorrows for consoling:

Yea, their inmost hopes shall yearn to thee for counsel,

They will not hide their very loves, if thou hast won their trust;

But, even as man and woman, shall they gladly seek their father,

Feeling yet as children feel, though void of fear in honour:

And thou shall be a Nestor in the camp, the just and good old man,

Hearty still, though full of years, and held the friend of all;

No secret shall be kept from thee; for if ill, thy wisdom may repair it;

If well, thy praise is precious; and they would not miss that prize.

O the blessing of a home, where old and young mix kindly,

The young unawed, the old unchilled, in unreserved communion!

O that refuge from the world, when a stricken son or daughter

May seek, with confidence of love, a father's hearth and heart;

Sure of a welcome, though others cast them out; of kindness, though men scorn them;

And finding there the last to blame, the earliest to commend.

Come unto me, my son, if sin shall have tempted thee astray,

I will not chide thee like the rest, but help thee to return;

Come unto me, my son, if men rebuke and mock thee,

There always shall be one to bless,—for I am on thy side!

Alas,—and bitter is their loss, the parents, and the children,

Who, loving up and down the world, have missed each other's friendship.

Haply, it had grown of careless life, for years go swiftly by;

Or sprang of too much carefulness, that drank up all the streams:

Haply, sullen disappointment came and quenched the fire;

Haply, sternness, or misrule, crushed or warped the feelings.

Then, ill-combined in tempers, they learnt not each the other;

The growing child grew out of love, and drew the breath of fear;

The youth, ill-trained, renounced his fears, and made a league with cunning;

And so those hardened men were foes, that should have been chief friends.

Where was the cause, the mutual cause? O hunt it out to kill it:

And what the cure, the simple cure?—A mutual flash of love.

For dull estrangement's daily air froze up those early sympathies

By cold continuance in apathy, or cutting winds of censure;

It was a slow process, which any fleeting hour could have melted;

But every hour duly came, and passed without the sun.

Caution, care, and dry distrust, obscured each other's minds,

Till both those gardens, rich to yield, were rank with many weeds:

And doubt, a hidden worm, gnawed at the root of their Society,

They lacked of mutual confidence, and lived in mutual dread.

Judge me, many fathers; and hearken to my counsel, many sons;

I come with good in either hand, to reconcile contentions;

For better friends can no man have, than those whom God hath given,

And he that hath despised the gift, thought ill of that he knew not.

Be ye wiser,—(I speak unto the sons,)—and win paternal friendships,

Cultivate their kindness, seek them out with honour, and be the screening Japhet to their failings:

And be ye wiser,—(I speak unto the fathers)—gain those filial comrades,

Cherish their reasonable converse, and look not with coldness on your children.

For the friendship of a child is the brightest gem set upon the circlet of Society,

A jewel worth a world of pains—a jewel seldom seen.

The third cycle on the waters, another of those rings upon the onyx,

A further definite broad zone, holdeth kith and kin:

A motley band of many tribes, and under various banners;

The intimate and strangers, the known and loved, or only seen for loathing:

Some, dear for their deserts, shall honour and have honour of relationship,

Some, despising duties, will add to it both burden and disgrace.

A man's nearest kin are oftentimes far other than his dearest,

Yet in the season of affliction those will haste to help him.

For, note thou this, the providence of God hath bound up families together,

To mutual aid and patient trial; yea, those ties are strong.

Friends are ever dearer in thy wealth, but relations to be trusted in thy need,

For these are God's appointed way, and those the choice of man:

There is lower warmth in kin, but smaller truth in friends,

The latter show more surface, and the first have more of depth:

Relations rally to the rescue, even in estrangement and neglect,

Where friends will have fled at thy defeat, even after promises and kindness;

For friends come and go, the whim that bound may loose them,

But none can dissever a relationship, and Fate hath tied the knot.

Wide, and edged with shadowy bounds, a distant boulevard to the city,

The common crowd of social life is buzzing round about:

That is as the outer court, with all defences levelled,

Ranged around a man's own fortress, and his father's house.

For many friends go in and out, and praise thee, finding pasture,

And some are honeycomb to-day, who turn to gall to-morrow:

And many a garrulous acquaintance with his frequent visit

Will spend his leisure to thy cost, selling dulness dearly:

For the idle call is a heavy tax, where time is counted gold,

And even in the day of relaxation, haply he may spare his presence,—

He found himself alone, and came to talk,—till they that hear are tired;

Let the man bethink him of an errand, that his face be not unwelcome.

But many friends there be, both well and wisely greeted,

Gladly are they hailed upon the hills, and are chidden that they come so seldom.

Of such are the early recollections, school friendships that have thriven to grey hairs,

And veteran men are young once more, and talk of boyish pranks:

And such, yet older on the list, are those who loved thy father,

Thy father's friend, and thine, who tendereth thee tried love:

Such also, many gentle hearts, whom thou hast known too lately,

Hastening now to learn their worth, and chary of those minutes:

And such, thy faithful pastor, coming to thy home with peace;—

Greet the good man heartily,—and bid thy children bless him!

Many thoughts, many thoughts,—who can catch them all?

The best are ever swiftest winged, the duller lag behind:

For, behold, in these vast themes, my mind is as a forest of the West,

And flocking pigeons come in clouds, and bend the groaning branches;

Here for a rest, then off and away,—they have sped to other climes,

And leave me to my peace once more, a holiday from thoughts.

I dare not lure them back, for the mighty subject of Society

Would tempt to many a hackneyed note in many a weary key:

Sage warnings, stout advice, experiences ever to be learned,

The foolish floatiness of vanity, and solemn trumperies of pride,—

Economy, the poor man's mint,—extravagance, the rich man's pitfall,

Harmful copings with the better, and empty-headed apings of the worse,

Circumstance and custom, sympathies, antipathies, diverse kinds of conversation,

Vapid pleasures, the weariness of gaiety, the strife and bustle of the world,

Home comforts, the miseries of style, the cobweb lines of etiquette,

The hollowness of courtesies, and substance of deceits,—idleness, business, and pastime,—

The multitude of matters to be done, the when, and where, and how,

And varying shades of character, to do, undo, or miss them,—

All these, and many more alike, thick converging fancies,

Flit in throngs about my theme, as honey-bees at even to their hive.

Find an end, or make one: these seeds are dragon's teeth:

Sown thoughts grow to things, and fill that field, the world:

Many wise have gone before, and used the sickle well;

Who can find a corner now, where none have bound the sheaves?

So, other some may reap: I do but glean and gather:

My sorry handful hath been culled after the ripe harvest of Society.

OF SOLITUDE.

Who hath known his brother,—or found him in his freedom unrestrained?

Even he, whose hidden glance hath watched his deepest Solitude.

For we walk the world in domino, putting on characters and habits,

And wear a social Janus mask, while others stand around:

I speak not of the hypocrite, nor dream of meant deceptions,

But of that quick unconscious change, whereof the best know most.

For mind hath its influence on mind; and no man is free but when alone;

Yea, let a dog be watching thee, its eye will tend to thy restraint:

Self-possession cannot be so perfect, with another intellect beside thee,

It is not as a natural result, but rather the educated produce:

The presence of a second spirit must control thine own,

And throw it off its equipoise of peace, to balance by an effort.

The common minds of common men know of this but little;

What then? they know nothing of themselves: I speak to those who know.

The consciousness that some are hearing, cometh as a care,

The sense that some are watching near, bindeth thee to caution;

And the tree of tender nerves shrinketh as a touched mimosa,

Drooping like a plant in drought, with half its strength decayed.

There are antipathies warning from the many, and sympathies drawing to the few,

But merchant-minds have crushed the first, and cannot feel the latter:

Whereas to the quickened apprehension of a keen and spiritual intellect,

Antipathies are galling, and sympathies oppress, and solitude is quiet.

He that dwelleth mainly by himself, heedeth most of others,

But they that live in crowds, think chiefly of themselves.

There is indeed a selfish seeming, where the anchorite liveth alone,

But probe his thoughts,—they travel far, dreaming for ever of the world:

And there is an apparent generosity, when a man mixeth freely with his fellows;

But prove his mind, by day and night, his thoughts are all of self:

The world, inciting him to pleasures, or relentlessly provoking him to toil,

Is full of anxious rivals, each with a difference of interest;

So must he plan and practise for himself, even as his own best friend;

And the gay soul of dissipation never had a thought unselfish.

The hermit standeth out of strife, abiding in a contemplative calmness;

What shall he contemplate,—himself? a meagre theme for musing:

He hath cast off follies, and kept aloof from cares; a man of simple wants;

God and the soul, these are his excuse, a just excuse, for solitude:

But he carried with him to his cell the half-dead feelings of humanity;

There were they rested and refreshed; and he yearned once more on men.

Where is the wise, or the learned, or the good, that sought not solitude for thinking,

And from seclusion's secret vale brought forth his precious fruits?

Forests of Aricia, your deep shade mellowed Numa's wisdom,

Peaceful gardens of Vaucluse, ye nourished Petrarch's love;

Solitude made a Cincinnatus, ripening the hero and the patriot,

And taught De StaËl self-knowledge, even in the damp Bastile;

It fostered the piety of Jerome, matured the labours of Augustine,

And gave imperial Charles religion for ambition:

That which Scipio praised, that which Alfred practised,

Which fired Demosthenes to eloquence, and fed the mind of Milton,

Which quickened zeal, nurtured genius, found out the secret things of science,

Helped repentance, shamed folly, and comforted the good with peace,—

By all men just and wise, by all things pure and perfect,

How truly, Solitude, art thou the fostering nurse of greatness!

Enough;—the theme is vast; sear me these necks of Hydra:

What shall drive away the thoughts flocking to this carcase?

Yea,—that all which man may think, hath long been said of Solitude:

For many wise have proved and preached its evils and its good.

I cannot add,—I will not steal; enough, for all is spoken:

Yet heed thou these for practice, and discernment among men.

There are pompous talkers, solemn, oracular, and dull:

Track them from society to solitude; and there ye find them fools.

There are light-hearted jesters, taking up with company for pastime;

How speed they when alone?—serious, wise, and thoughtful.

And wherefore? both are actors, saving when in solitude,

There they live their truest life, and all things show sincere:

But the fool by pomposity of speech striveth to be counted wise,

And the wise, for holiday and pleasance, playeth with the fool's best bauble.

The solemn seemer, as a rule, will be found more ignorant and shallow

Than those who laugh both loud and long, content to hide their knowledge.

For thee; seek thou Solitude, but neither in excess, nor morosely;

Seek her for her precious things, and not of thine own pride.

For there, separate from a crowd, the still small voice will talk with thee,

Truth's whisper, heard and echoed by responding conscience;

There, shalt thou gather up the ravelled skeins of feeling,

And mend the nets of usefulness, and rest awhile for duties;

There, thou shalt hive thy lore, and eat the fruits of study,

For Solitude delighteth well to feed on many thoughts:

There, as thou sittest peaceful, communing with fancy,

The precious poetry of life shall gild its leaden cares:

There, as thou walkest by the sea, beneath the gentle stars,

Many kindling seeds of good will sprout within thy soul;

Thou shalt weep in Solitude,—thou shalt pray in Solitude,

Thou shalt sing for joy of heart, and praise the grace of Solitude.

Pass on, pass on!—for this is the path of wisdom:

God make thee prosper on the way; I leave thee well with Solitude.

RECAPITULATION.

Every beginning is shrouded in a mist, those vague ideas beyond,

And the traveller setteth on his journey, oppressed with many thoughts,

Balancing his hopes and fears, and looking for some order in the chaos,

Some secret path between the cliffs, that seem to bar his way:

So, he commenceth at a clue, unravelling its tangled skein,

And boldly speedeth on to thread the labyrinth before him.

Then as he gropeth in the darkness, light is attendant on his steps,

He walketh straight in fervent faith, and difficulties vanish at his presence;

The very flashing of his sword scattereth those shadowy foes;

Confident and sanguine of success, he goeth forth conquering and to conquer.

Every middle is burdened with a weariness,—to have to go as far again,—

And Diligence is sick at heart, and Enterprise foot-sore:

That which began in zeal, bursting as a fresh-dug spring,

Goeth on doggedly in toil, and hath no help of nature:

Then, is need of moral might, to wrestle with the animal re-action,

Still to fight, with few men left, and still though faint pursuing.

The middle is a marshy flat, whereon the wheels go heavily,

With clouds of doubt above, and ruts of discouragement below:

Press on, sturdy traveller, yet a league, and yet a league!

While every step is binding wings on thy victorious feet.

Every end is happiness, the glorious consummation of design,

The perils past, the fears annulled, the journey at its close:

And the traveller resteth in complacency, home-returned at last:

Work done may claim its wages, the goal gained hath won its prize:

While the labour lasted, while the race was running,

Many-times the sinews ached, and half refused the struggle:

But now, all is quietness, a pleasant hour given to repose;

Calmness in the retrospect of good, and calmness in the prospect of a blessing.

Hope was glad in the beginning, and fear was sad midway,

But sweet fruition cometh in the end, a harvest safe and sure.

That which is, can never not have been: facts are solid as the pyramids:

A thing done is written in the rock, yea, with a pen of iron.

Uncertainty no more can scare, the proof is seen complete,

Nor accident render unaccomplished, for the deed is finished.

Thus the end shall crown the work, with grace, grace, unto the top-stone,

And the work shall triumph in its crown, with peace, peace, unto the builder.

I have written, as other some of old, in quaint and meaning phrase,

Of many things for either world, a crowd of facts and fancies:

And will ye judge me, men of mind?—judge in kindly calmness;

For bitter words of haste or hate have often been repented.

Deep dreaming upon surface reading; imagery crowded over argument;

Order less considered in the multitude of thoughts: this witnessing is just.

Scripture gave the holier themes, the well-turned words and wisdom;

While Fancy on her swallow's wing skimmed those deeper waters.

And wilt thou say with shrewdness,—He hath burnished up old truths,

But where he seemed to fashion new, the novelty was false?

Alas, for us in these last days, our elders reaped the harvest:

Alas, for all men in all times, who glean so many tares!

That which is true, how should it be new? for time is old in years:

That which is new, how should it be true? for I am young in wisdom:

Nevertheless, I have spoken at my best, according to the mercies given me,

Of high, and deep, and famous things, of Evil, or of Good.

I have told of Errors near akin to Truth, and wholesomes linked with poison;

Of subtle Uses in the humblest, and the deep laid plots of Pride:

I have praised Wisdom, comforted thy Hope, and proved to thee the folly of Complainings;

Hinted at the hazard of an Influence, and turned thee from the terrors of Ambition.

I have shown thee thy captivity to Law: yet bade thee hide Humilities;

I have lifted the curtains of Memory; and smoothed the soft pillow of Rest.

Experience had his sober hour; and Character its keen appreciation;

And holy Anger stood sublime, where Hatred fell condemned.

Prayer spake the mind of God, even in His own good words:

And Zeal, with kindness warmly mixt, allied him to Discretion.

I taught thee that nothing is a Trifle, even to the laugh of Recreation;

I led thee with the Train of Religion, to be dazzled at the name of the Triune.

Thought confessed his unseen fears; and Speech declared his triumphs;

I sang the blessedness of books; and commended the prudence of a letter:

Riches found their room, either unto honour—or despising:

Inventions took their lower place, for all things come of God.

I scorned Ridicule; nor would humble me for Praise; for I had gained Self-knowledge;

And pleaded fervently for Brutes, who suffer for man's sin.

Then, I rose to Friendship; and bathed in all the tenderness of Love;

Knew the purity of Marriage; and blest the face of Children.

And whereas, by petulance or pride, I had haply said some evil,

Mine after-thought was Tolerance, to bear the faults of all:

Many faults, ill to bear, bred the theme of Sorrow;

Many virtues, dear to see, induced the gush of Joy.

Thus, for awhile, as leaving thee in joy, was I loth to break that spell;

I roamed to other things and thoughts, and fashioned other books.

But in a season of reflection, after many days,

A thought stood before me in its garment of the past,—and lo, a legion with it!

They came in thronging bands,—I could not fight nor fly them,—

And so they took me to their tent, the prisoner of thoughts.

Then, I bade thee greet me well, and heed my cheerful counsels;

For every day we have a Friend, who changeth not with time.

Gladly did I speak of my commission, for I felt it graven on my heart,

And could not hold my wiser peace, but magnified mine office.

Mystery had left her echoes in my mind, and I discoursed her secret:

And thence I turned aside to man, and judged him for his Gifts.

Beauty, noble thesis, had a world of sweets to sing of,

And dated all her praise from God, the birthday of the soul.

Thence grew Fame; and Flattery came like Agag;

But this was as the nauseous dregs, of that inspiring cup:

Forth from Flattery sprang in opposition harsh and dull Neglect;

And kind Contentment's gentle face to smile away the sadness.

Life, all buoyancy and light, and Death, that sullen silence,

Sped the soul to Immortality, the final home of man.

Then, in metaphysical review, passed a triple troop,

Swift Ideas, sounding Names, and heavily armed Things:

Faith spake of her achievements even among men her brethren;

And Honesty, with open mouth, would vindicate himself:

The retrospect of Social life had many truths to tell of,

And then I left thee to thy Solitude, learning there of Wisdom.

Friend and scholar, lover of the right, mine equal kind companion,—

I prize indeed thy favour, and these sympathies are dear:

Still, if thy heart be little with me, wot thou well, my brother,

I canvass not the smiles of praise, nor dread the frowns of censure.

Through many themes in many thoughts, have we held sweet converse;

But God alone be praised for mind! He only is sufficient,

And every thought in every theme by prayer had been established:

Who then should fear the face of man, when God hath answered prayer?—

I speak it not in arrogance of heart, but humbly as of justice,

I think it not in vanity of soul, but tenderly, for gratitude,—

God hath blest my mind, and taught it many truths:

And I have echoed some to thee, in weakness, yet sincerely:

Yea, though ignorance and error shall have marred those lessons of His teaching,

I stand in mine own Master's praise, or fall to His reproof.

If thou lovest, help me with thy blessing; if otherwise, mine shall be for thee;

If thou approvest, heed my words; if otherwise, in kindness be my teacher.

Many mingled thoughts for self have warped my better aim;

Many motives tempted still, to toil for pride or praise:

Alas, I have loved pride and praise, like others worse or worthier;

But hate and fear them now, as snakes that fastened on my hand:

ScÆvola burnt both hand and crime; but Paul flung the viper on the fire:

He shook it off, and felt no harm: so be it! I renounce them.

Rebuke then, if thou wilt rebuke,—but neither hastily nor harshly;

Or, if thou wilt commend, be it honestly, of right: I work for God and good.

The End of the Second Series

BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

Transcriber's Note.

Apparent typographical errors have been corrected.

Hyphenation has been made consistent.

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