abysses

In the quiet of midnight.

Thou alone know'st the glory of summer, Gazing down on thy broad seas of forest, On thy subjects that send a proud mur

fate,

That once lit all the East;

A dotard bleared and hoary,

There Asser crouches o'er the blackened

brands

Of Asia's long-quenched glory.

Still as a city buried 'neath the sea
Thy courts and temples stand;
Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry
Of saints and heroes grand,
Thy phantasms grope and shiver,

Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently

Into Time's gnawing river.

Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun,
Of their old godhead lorn,

Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun,
Which they misdeem for morn;
And yet the eternal sorrow

In their unmonarched eyes says day is done
Without the hope of morrow.

O realm of silence and of swart eclipse, The shapes that haunt thy gloom Make signs to us and move their withered lips

Across the gulf of doom;

Yet all their sound and motion

Bring no more freight to us than wraiths

of ships

On the mirage's ocean.

And if sometimes a moaning wandereth
From out thy desolate halls,

If some grim shadow of thy living death
Across our sunshine falls

And scares the world to error,

The eternal life sends forth melodious breath

To chase the misty terror.

Thy mighty clamors, wars, and worldnoised deeds

Are silent now in dust, Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds

Beneath some sudden gust; Thy forms and creeds have vanished, Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds From the world's garden banished.

Whatever of true life there was in thee Leaps in our age's veins;

pery,

And shake thine idle chains;To thee thy dross is clinging,

For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets

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
Oppressor

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,
A-weary 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;

Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams, This agony of hopeless contrast spare me! Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night!

He is a coward, who would borrow
A charm against the present sorrow
From the vague Future's promise of de-
light:

As life's alarums nearer roll,
The ancestral buckler calls,
Self-clanging from the walls
In the high temple of the soul;

lost brother.

To thee the Martyr looketh, and his fires Unlock their fangs and leave his spirit free;

To thee the Poet mid his toil aspires, And grief and hunger climb about his knee,

Welcome as children; thou upholdest

The lone Inventor by his demon haunted; The Prophet cries to thee when hearts are coldest,

And gazing o'er the midnight's bleak abyss,

Sees the drowsed soul awaken at thy kiss,

And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted.

I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek, His throne is with the outcast and the weak.

THE PRESENT CRISIS

Dated December, 1844.

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

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 't is
Truth alone is strong,

And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng

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 recog

nizing start,

her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,

That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea;

Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry

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

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,

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,

But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,

List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,

66

They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."

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