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What doth the poor man's son inherit?
A patience learn'd of being poor,
Courage, if sorrow come, to bear it,
A fellow-feeling that is sure

To make the outcast bless his door;
A heritage, it seems to me,
A king might wish to hold in fee.

O rich man's son! there is a toil
That with all others level stands:
Large charity doth never soil,

But only whiten, soft white hands,This is the best crop from thy lands; A heritage, it seems to me,

Worth being rich to hold in fee.

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poor man's son! scorn not thy state; There is worse weariness than thine

In merely being rich and great:

Toil only gives the soul to shine, And makes rest fragrant and benign, A heritage, it seems to me,

Worth being poor to hold in fee.

Both, heirs to some six feet of sod,
Are equal in the earth at last:
Both, children of the same dear God,
Prove title to your heirship vast
By record of a well-fill'd past;

A heritage, it seems to me,
Well worth a life to hold in fee.

A PRAYER

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

God! do not let my loved one die,
But rather wait until the time
That I am grown in purity

Enough to enter thy pure clime;
Then take me, I will gladly go,
So that my love remain below!

O, let her stay! She is by birth

What I through death must learn to be,

We need her more on our poor earth,

Than thou canst need in heaven with thee:

She hath her wings already, I

Must burst this earth-shell ere I fly.

Then, God, take me! We shall be near,

More near than ever, each to each:
Her angel ears will find more clear
My heavenly than my earthly speech;
And still, as I draw nigh to thee,
Her soul and mine shall closer be.

A REQUIEM

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Ay, pale and silent maiden,
Cold as thou liest there,
Thine was the sunniest nature
That ever drew the air,

The wildest and most wayward,
And yet so gently kind,
Thou seemedst but to body
A breath of summer wind.

Into the eternal shadow

That girds our life around, Into the infinite silence

Wherewith Death's shore is bound,

Thou hast gone forth, beloved!
And I were mean to weep,
That thou hast left Life's shallows,
And dost possess the Deep.

Thou liest low and silent,

Thy heart is cold and still,
Thine eyes are shut forever,
And Death hath had his will;
He loved and would have taken,
I loved and would have kept,

We strove,

and he was stronger,

And I have never wept.

Let him possess thy body,

Thy soul is still with me, More sunny and more gladsome Than it was wont to be:

Thy body was a fetter

That bound me to the flesh, Thank God that it is broken, And now I live afresh!

Now I can see thee clearly;
The dusky cloud of clay,
That hid thy starry spirit,
Is rent and blown away:
To earth I give thy body,
Thy spirit to the sky,

I saw its bright wings growing,
And knew that thou must fly.

Now I can love thee truly,
For nothing comes between

The senses and the spirit,
The seen and the unseen;
Lifts the eternal shadow,

The silence bursts apart,
And the soul's boundless future
Is present in my heart.

THE PRESENT CRISIS

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast

Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east

to west,

And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb

To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem

of Time.

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,

When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to

and fro;

At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start, Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips

apart,

And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.

So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,

Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,

And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God,

In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,

Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears

along,

Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flush of right or wrong;

Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame

Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;

In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal

claim.

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