The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred

By any but the North-wind's hurrying keels.

And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds

To my world-seeking heart paid fealty,
And catered for it as the Cretan bees
Brought honey to the baby Jupiter,
Who in his soft hand crushed a violet,
Godlike foremusing the rough thunder's
gripe;

Then did I entertain the poet's song,
My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er
That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell,
I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains
Whose adamantine links, his manacles,
The western main shook growling, and
still gnawed.

I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale
Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne's
keel

Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore:

For I believed the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep, And, listening to the inner flow of things, Speak to the age out of eternity.

Ah me! old hermits sought for solitude In caves and desert places of the earth, Where their own heart-beat was the only

stir

Of living thing that comforted the year;
But the bald pillar-top of Simeon,
In midnight's blankest waste, were pop-
ulous,

Matched with the isolation drear and deep

Of him who pines among the swarm of

men,

At once a new thought's king and pris

oner,

Feeling the truer life within his life, The fountain of his spirit's prophecy, Sinking away and wasting, drop by drop, In the ungrateful sands of sceptic ears. He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods Doth walk a king; for him the pent-up cell

Widens beyond the circles of the stars, And all the sceptred spirits of the past Come thronging in to greet him as their

peer;

But in the market-place's glare and throng

He sits apart, an exile, and his brow Aches with the mocking memory of its

crown.

Of a world's solitude, sweep broadening down,

And, gathering to itself a thousand streams,

Grow sacred ere it mingle with the sea;
I see the ungated wall of chaos old,
With blocks Cyclopean hewn of solid
night,

Fade like a wreath of unreturning mist
Before the irreversible feet of light;
And lo, with what clear omen in the east
On day's gray threshold stands the
eager
dawn,
Like young Leander rosy from the sea
Glowing at Hero's lattice!

One day more These muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me:

God, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded;

Let not this one frail bark, to hollow which

I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so Cast up to warp and blacken in the sun, Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle

off

His cheek-swollen pack, and from the leaning mast

Fortune's full sail strains forward!

a work of human art,

They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart.

Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak,

Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone,

Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone.

It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough,

A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough;

The thick spires yearned towards the sky And in broad sunlight basked and slept, in quaint harmonious lines,

like a grove of blasted pines.

Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right

To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light;

And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells

Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells.

Surge leaping after surge, the fire roared

onward red as blood,

Till half of Hamburg lay engulfed beFor miles away the fiery spray poured neath the eddying flood; And back and forth the billows sucked, down its deadly rain,

and paused, and burst again.

From square to square with tiger leaps panted the lustful fire,

The air to leeward shuddered with the gasps of its desire;

And church and palace, which even now stood whelmed but to the knee, Lift their black roofs like breakers lone amid the whirling sea.

Up in his tower old Herman sat and watched with quiet look ;

His soul had trusted God too long to be at last forsook ;

He could not fear, for surely God a pathway would unfold

Through this red sea for faithful hearts, as once he did of old.