Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight, Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers?

Gazing upon the sunset's high-heaped gold,

Its crags of opal and of chrysolite,

Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold

Still brightening abysses, And blazing precipices, Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven,

Sometimes a glimpse is given Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted blisses.

O Land of Quiet! to thy shore the surf Of the perturbed Present rolls and sleeps;

Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turf

And lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps,

As to a mother's, the o'erwearied heart, Hearing far off and dim the toiling mart,

The hurrying feet, the curses without number,

And, circled with the glow Elysian Of thine exulting vision, Out of its very cares woos charms for peace and slumber.

To thee the earth lifts up her fettered hands

And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile

Thou blessest her, and she forgets her bands,

And her old woe-worn face a little while

Grows young and noble; unto thee the
Óppressor

Looks, and is dumb with awe;
The eternal law,

Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser,

Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding,

And he can see the grim-eyed
Doom

From out the trembling gloom Its silent-footed steeds towards his palace goading.

What promises hast thou for Poets'

eyes,

Aweary of the turmoil and the wrong ! To all their hopes what overjoyed replies !

What undreamed ecstasies for blissful song!

Thy happy plains no war-trump's brawling clangor

Disturbs, and fools the poor to hate the poor;

The humble glares not on the high with anger;

Love leaves no grudge at less, no greed for more;

In vain strives Self the godlike sense to smother;

From the soul's deeps
It throbs and leaps;

The noble 'neath foul rags beholds his long-lost brother.

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 manchild 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 flash 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.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on

whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals

shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the

beacon-moments see,

That, like peaks of some sunk contitinent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry

Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly;

Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by. Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness

'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. We see dimly in the Present what is

small and what is great, Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,

Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,

Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,

Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey ;

Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,

And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,

they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,

Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,

By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track,

Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts burned

hath

Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For Humanity sweeps onward: where

to-day the martyr stands,

On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;

Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return

To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.

'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves

Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves, Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime; Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?

Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make Plymouth rock sublime?

They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,

Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's;

But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.

They have rights who dare maintain

them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagts round the prophets of to-day?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,

on,

When falling leaves falter through motionless air

Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!

How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,

As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills

The bowl between me and those distant hills,

And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

No more the landscape holds its wealth apart,

Making me poorer in my poverty, But mingles with my senses and my heart;

My own projected spirit seems to me In her own reverie the world to