Till the slow mountain's dial-hand Shortens to noon's triumphal hour,— While ye sit idle, do ye think

The Lord's great work sits idle too? That light dare not o'erleap the brink Of morn, because 't is dark with you?

Though yet your valleys skulk in night,

In God's ripe fields the day is cried, And reapers, with their sickles bright, Troop, singing, down the mountainside:

Come up, and feel what health there is

In the frank Dawn's delighted eyes, As, bending with a pitying kiss,

The night-shed tears of Earth she dries!

More worthy than our twilight dim,

For meek Obedience, too, is Light, And following that is finding Him.

THE CAPTIVE.

IT was past the hour of trysting,
But she lingered for him still;
Like a child, the eager streamlet
Leaped and laughed adown the hill,
Happy to be free at twilight

From its toiling at the mill.

Then the great moon on a sudden
Ominous, and red as blood,
Startling as a new creation,

O'er the eastern hill-top stood,
Casting deep and deeper shadows
Through the mystery of the wood.

Dread closed huge and vague about her,

And her thoughts turned fearfully To her heart, if there some shelter From the silence there might be, Like bare cedars leaning inland

From the blighting of the sea.

Yet he came not, and the stillness

Dampened round her like a tomb; She could feel cold eyes of spirits

Looking on her through the gloom, She could hear the groping footsteps Of some blind, gigantic doom.

Suddenly the silence wavered

Like a light mist in the wind,
For a voice broke gently through it,
Felt like sunshine by the blind,
And the dread, like mist in sunshine,
Furled serenely from her mind.

"Once my love, my love forever,-
Flesh or spirit still the same;
If I missed the hour of trysting,
Do not think my faith to blame,
I, alas, was made a captive,

As from Holy Land I came.

"On a green spot in the desert,

Gleaming like an emerald star,

"There thou 'lt find the humble postern
To the castle of my foe;
If thy love burn clear and faithful,
Strike the gateway, green and low,
Ask to enter, and the warder

Surely will not say thee no."

Slept again the aspen silence,
But her loneliness was o'er;
Round her heart a motherly patience

Wrapt its arms forevermore;
From her soul ebbed back the sorrow,
Leaving smooth the golden shore.

Donned she now the pilgrim scallop,

Took the pilgrim staff in hand; Like a cloud-shade, flitting eastward, Wandered she o'er sea and land; And her footsteps in the desert

Fell like cool rain on the sand.

Forward leaped she o'er the threshold, Eager as a glancing surf;

Fell from her the spirit's languor,

Fell from her the body's scurf;'Neath the palm next day some Arabs Found a corpse upon the turf.

THE BIRCH-TREE.

RIPPLING through thy branches goes the sunshine,

Among thy leaves that palpitate for

ever;

Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had prisoned,

The soul once of some tremulous inland river,

Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb forever!

While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine, Holds up its leaves in happy, happy silence,

Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended,

I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands,

And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence.

Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet,

Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad, Dripping about thy slim white stem, whose shadow

Slopes quivering down the water's dusky quiet,

Thou shrink'st as on her bath's edge would some startled Dryad. Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers; Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping;

Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience,

And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping

Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping.

Thou art to me like my beloved maiden, So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences;

For, as that saved of bird and beast A pair for propagation,

So has the seed of these increased And furnished half the nation.

Kings sit, they say, in slippery seats:
But those slant precipices

Of ice the northern voyager meets
Less slippery are than this is :
To cling therein would pass the wit
Of royal man or woman,
And whatsoe'er can stay in it

Is more or less than human.

I offer to all bores this perch,
Dear well-intentioned people
With heads as void as week-day church,
Tongues longer than the steeple ;
To folks with missions, whose gaunt

eyes

See golden ages rising,

Salt of the earth! in what queer Guys
Thou 'rt fond of crystallizing !

My wonder, then, was not unmixed
With merciful suggestion,
When, as my roving eyes grew fixed
Upon the chair in question,

I saw its trembling arms enclose
A figure grim and rusty,
Whose doublet plain and plainer hose
Were something worn and dusty.

Now even such men as Nature forms
Merely to fill the street with,
Once turned to ghosts by hungry worms,
Are serious things to meet with;
Your penitent spirits are no jokes,
And, though I'm not averse to
A quiet shade, even they are folks
One cares not to speak first to.

Who knows, thought I, but he has come,
By Charon kindly ferried,
To tell me of a mighty sum
Behind my wainscot buried?
There is a buccaneerish air

About that garb outlandish -
Just then the ghost drew up his chair
And said, "My name is Standish.

"I come from Plymouth, deadly bored
With toasts, and songs, and speeches,
As long and flat as my old sword,
As threadbare as my breeches :

They understand us Pilgrims ! they, Smooth men with rosy faces, Strength's knots and gnarls all pared

away,

And varnish in their places!

"We had some toughness in our grain,
The eye to rightly see us is
Not just the one that lights the brain
Of drawing-room Tyrtæuses:
They talk about their Pilgrim blood,
Their birthright high and holy !-
A mountain-stream that ends in mud
Methinks is melancholy.

"He had stiff knees, the Puritan,
That were not good at bending;
The homespun dignity of man

He thought was worth defending; He did not, with his pinchbeck ore, His country's shame forgotten, Gild Freedom's coffin o'er and o'er, When all within was rotten.

"Good sir," I said, "you seem much stirred;

The sacred compromises"Now God confound the dastard word! My gall thereat arises: Northward it hath this sense alone,

That you, your conscience blinding, Shall bow your fool's nose to the stone, When slavery feels like grinding.

""Tis shame to see such painted sticks
In Vane's and Winthrop's places,
To see your spirit of Seventy-six
Drag humbly in the traces,
With slavery's lash upon her back,
And herds of office-holders
To shout applause, as, with a crack,
It peels her patient shoulders.

"We forefathers to such a rout! -
No, by my faith in God's word! "

Half rose the ghost, and half drew out The ghost of his old broadsword, Then thrust it slowly back again, And said, with reverent gesture, "No, Freedom, no! blood should not stain

The hem of thy white vesture. "I feel the soul in me draw near

The mount of prophesying; In this bleak wilderness I hear A John the Baptist crying; Far in the east I see upleap

The streaks of first forewarning,
And they who sowed the light shall reap
The golden sheaves of morning.
"Child of our travail and our woe,
Light in our day of sorrow,
Through my rapt spirit I foreknow
The glory of thy morrow;

I hear great steps, that through the shade
Draw nigher still and nigher,
And voices call like that which bade
The prophet come up higher."

I looked, no form mine eyes could find,
I heard the red cock crowing,
And through my window-chinks the
wind

A dismal tune was blowing;
Thought I, My neighbor Buckingham
Hath somewhat in him gritty,
Some Pilgrim-stuff that hates all sham,
And he will print my ditty.

ON THE CAPTURE OF CERTAIN FUGITIVE SLAVES NEAR WASHINGTON.

Look on who will in apathy, and stifle they who can,

The sympathies, the hopes, the words, that make man truly man; Let those whose hearts are dungeoned up with interest or with ease Consent to hear with quiet pulse of loathsome deeds like these!

I first drew in New England's air, and from her hardy breast

Sucked in the tyrant-hating milk that will not let me rest;

Though we break our fathers' promise, we have nobler duties first; The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed;

Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod,

Than be true to Church and State while

we are doubly false to God!

We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, more,

To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit's core ;Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so, but then

Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

He's true to God who's true to man; wherever wrong is done, To the humblest and the weakest, 'neath the all-beholding sun, That wrong is also done to us; and they are slaves most base, Whose love of right is for themselves, and not for all their race.

God works for all. Ye cannot hem the hope of being free

With parallels of latitude, with mountain-range or sea.