YE who, passing graves by night,
Glance not to the left nor right,
Lest a spirit should arise,

Cold and white, to freeze your eyes,
Some weak phantom, which your doubt
Shapes upon the dark without
From the dark within, a guess
At the spirit's deathlessness,
Which ye entertain with fear
In your self-built dungeon here,
Where
ye sell your God-given lives
Just for gold to buy you gyves,—
Ye without a shudder meet
In the city's noonday street,
Spirits sadder and more dread
Than from out the clay have fled,
Buried, beyond hope of light,
In the body's haunted night!

See ye not that woman pale?
There are bloodhounds on her trail!
Bloodhounds two, all gaunt and lean,-
For the soul their scent is keen,
Want and Sin, and Sin is last,
They have followed far and fast;

Want gave tongue, and, at her howl,
Sin awakened with a growl.
Ah, poor girl! she had a right
To a blessing from the light,
Title-deeds to sky and earth
God gave to her at her birth,
But, before they were enjoyed,
Poverty had made them void,
And had drunk the sunshine up
From all nature's ample cup,
Leaving her a first-born's share
In the dregs of darkness there.
Often, on the sidewalk bleak,
Hungry, all alone, and weak,
She has seen, in night and storm,
Rooms o'erflow with firelight warm,
Which, outside the window-glass,
Doubled all the cold, alas !
Till each ray that on her fell
Stabbed her like an icicle,
And she almost loved the wail
Of the bloodhounds on her trail.
Till the floor becomes her bier,
She shall feel their pantings near,
Close upon her very heels,
Spite of all the din of wheels;
Shivering on her pallet poor,
She shall hear them at the door
Whine and scratch to be let in,
Sister bloodhounds, Want and Sin!

Hark! that rustle of a dress,
Stiff with lavish costliness!

Here comes one whose cheek would flush

But to have her garment brush
'Gainst the girl whose fingers thin
Wove the weary broidery in,
Bending backward from her toil,
Lest her tears the silk might soil,
And, in midnight's chill and murk,
Stitched her life into the work,
Shaping from her bitter thought
Heart's ease and forget-me-not,
Satirizing her despair

With the emblems woven there.
Little doth the wearer heed

Of the heart-break in the brede;
A hyena by her side
Skulks, down-looking,

it is Pride.
He digs for her in the earth,
Where lie all her claims of birth,
With his foul paws rooting o'er
Some long-buried ancestor,

Who, perhaps, a statue won
By the ill deeds he had done,
By the innocent blood he shed,
By the desolation spread
Over happy villages,
Blotting out the smile of peace.

There walks Judas, he who sold
Yesterday his Lord for gold,
Sold God's presence in his heart
For a proud step in the mart;
He hath dealt in flesh and blood,
At the bank his name is good,
At the bank, and only there,
'T is a marketable ware.
In his eyes that stealthy gleam
Was not learned of sky or stream,
But it has the cold, hard glint
Of new dollars from the mint.
Open now your spirit's eyes,
Look through that poor clay disguise
Which has thickened, day by day,
Till it keeps all light at bay,
And his soul in pitchy gloom
Gropes about its narrow tomb,
From whose dank and slimy walls
Drop by drop the horror falls.
Look! a serpent lank and cold
Hugs his spirit fold on fold;
From his heart, all day and night,
It doth suck God's blessed light.
Drink it will, and drink it must,
Till the cup holds naught but dust;
All day long he hears it hiss,
Writhing in its fiendish bliss;
All night long he sees its eyes
Flicker with foul ecstasies,
As the spirit ebbs away
Into the absorbing clay.

Who is he that skulks, afraid
Of the trust he has betrayed,
Shuddering if perchance a gleam
Of old nobleness should stream
Through the pent, unwholesome room,
Where his shrunk soul cowers in
gloom,

Spirit sad beyond the rest
By more instinct for the best?
'Tis a poet who was sent
For a bad world's punishment,
By compelling it to see
Golden glimpses of To Be,
By compelling it to hear

Songs that prove the angels near ; Who was sent to be the tongue Of the weak and spirit-wrung, Whence the fiery-winged Despair In men's shrinking eyes might flare. 'Tis our hope doth fashion us To base use or glorious: He who might have been a lark Of Truth's morning, from the dark Raining down melodious hope Of a freer, broader scope, Aspirations, prophecies, Of the spirit's full sunrise, Chose to be a bird of night, Which, with eyes refusing light, Hooted from some hollow tree Of the world's idolatry. "T is his punishment to hear Flutterings of pinions near, And his own vain wings to feel Drooping downward to his heel, All their grace and import lost, Burdening his weary ghost: Ever walking by his side He must see his angel guide, Who at intervals doth turn Looks on him so sadly stern, With such ever-new surprise Of hushed anguish in her eyes, That it seems the light of day From around him shrinks away, Or drops blunted from the wall Built around him by his fall. Then the mountains, whose white peaks Catch the morning's earliest streaks, He must see, where prophets sit, Turning east their faces lit, Whence, with footsteps beautiful, To the earth, yet dim and dull, They the gladsome tidings bring Of the sunlight's hastening: Never can these hills of bliss Be o'erclimbed by feet like his !

And, not seldom blown to flame, Vindicate its ancient claim.

1844.

STUDIES FOR TWO HEADS.

I.

SOME sort of heart I know is hers,
I chanced to feel her pulse one night;
A brain she has that never errs,
And yet is never nobly right;
It does not leap to great results,
But, in some corner out of sight,
Suspects a spot of latent blight,
And, o'er the impatient infinite,
She bargains, haggles, and consults.
Her eye, it seems a chemic test

And drops upon you like an acid;
It bites you with unconscious zest,
So clear and bright, so coldly placid;
It holds you quietly aloof,

It holds, -and yet it does not win

you;

It merely puts you to the proof

And sorts what qualities are in you; It smiles, but never brings you nearer,

gone

It lights,-her nature draws not nigh; 'Tis but that yours is growing clearer To her assays;- yes, try and try, You'll get no deeper than her eye. There, you are classified: she's Far, far away into herself; Each with its Latin label on, Your poor components, one by one, Are laid upon their proper shelf In her compact and ordered mind, And what of you is left behind Is no more to her than the wind; In that clear brain, which, day and night, No movement of the heart e'er jostles,

Her friends are ranged on left and right,

Here, silex, hornblende, sienite; There, animal remains and fossils. And yet, O subtile analyst,

That canst each property detect Of mood or grain, that canst untwist Each tangled skein of intellect, And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare

HEAR him but speak, and you will feel

The shadows of the Portico Over your tranquil spirit steal,

To modulate all joy and woe To one subdued, subduing glow; Above our squabbling business-hours, Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty lowers, His nature satirizes ours;

A form and front of Attic grace,

He shames the higgling market-place, And dwarfs our more mechanic powers. What throbbing verse can fitly render That face, -so pure, so trembling-ten

der? Sensation glimmers through its rest, It speaks unmanacled by words, As full of motion as a nest That palpitates with unfledged birds; 'Tis likest to Bethesda's stream, Forewarned through all its thrilling springs,

White with the angel's coming gleam,
And rippled with his fanning wings.
Hear him unfold his plots and plans,
And larger destinies seem man's;
You conjure from his glowing face
The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans
The gulf wherein so many fall,
'Twixt possible and actual;
His first swift word, talaria-shod,
Exuberant with conscious God,
Out of the choir of planets blots
The present earth with all its spots.
Himself unshaken as the sky,
His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high
Systems and creeds pellmell together;
'Tis strange as to a deaf man's eye,
While trees uprooted splinter by,

The dumb turmoil of stormy weather;
Less of iconoclast than shaper,

His spirit, safe behind the reach
Of the tornado of his speech,

Burns calmly as a glowworm's taper.

So great in speech, but, ah! in act

So overrun with vermin troubles, The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact Of life collapses all his bubbles: Had he but lived in Plato's day,

He might, unless my fancy errs, Have shared that golden voice's sway O'er barefooted philosophers.

Our nipping climate hardly suits
The ripening of ideal fruits:
His theories vanquish us all summer,
But winter makes him dumb and
dumber;

To see him 'mid life's needful things
Is something painfully bewildering;
He seems an angel with clipt wings

Tied to a mortal wife and children, And by a brother seraph taken In the act of eating eggs and bacon. Like a clear fountain, his desire

Exults and leaps toward the light, In every drop it says "Aspire!

Striving for more ideal height;
And as the fountain, falling thence,
Crawls baffled through the common
gutter,

So, from his speech's eminence,
He shrinks into the present tense,

Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.

Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds

Not all of life that 's brave and wise is; He strews an ampler future's seeds,

'Tis your fault if no harvest rises; Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught That all he is and has is Beauty's? By soul the soul's gains must be wrought,

The Actual claims our coarser thought, The Ideal hath its higher duties.

ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO.

CAN this be thou who, lean and pale, With such immitigable eye

Didst look upon those writhing souls in bale,

And note each vengeance, and pass by

Unmoved, save when thy heart by

chance

Cast backward one forbidden glance, And saw Francesca, with child's glee, Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee

And with proud hands control its fiery prance?

With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow,

And eye remote, that inly sees
Fair Beatrice's spirit wandering now
In some sea-lulled Hesperides,
Thou movest through the jarring street,
Secluded from the noise of feet

By her gift-blossom in thy hand,
Thy branch of palm from Holy
Land;-

No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet.
Yet there is something round thy lips
That prophesies the coming doom,
The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the
eclipse

Notches the perfect disk with gloom; A something that would banish thee, And thine untamed pursuer be,

From men and their unworthy fates, Though Florence had not shut her

gates,

And Grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free.

Ah! he who follows fearlessly

The beckonings of a poet-heart Shall wander, and without the world's decree,

A banished man in field and mart; Harder than Florence' walls the bar Which with deaf sternness holds him far From home and friends, till death's

release,

And makes his only prayer for peace, Like thine, scarred veteran of a lifelong

war !

ON THE DEATH OF A
FRIEND'S CHILD.

DEATH never came so nigh to me before,

Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused