ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE.

ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD.

87

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; "T is 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,

per.

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,

"T is 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.

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

ness,

Of folded hands, closed eyes, and heart at rest,

And slumber sound beneath a flowery turf,

Of faults forgotten, and an inner place Kept sacred for us in the heart of friends;

But these were idle fancies, satisfied With the mere husk of this great mystery,

And dwelling in the outward shows of things.

Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams,

Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youth

Aim thitherward, but floats from bloom to bloom,

With earth's warm patch of sunshine well content:

'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God

The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed.

True is it that Death's face seems stern and cold,

When he is sent to summon those we love,

But all God's angels come to us

guised;

loss.

The bee hums on; around the blossomed vine

Whirs the light humming-bird; the cricket chirps;

The locust's shrill alarum stings the

ear;

Hard by, the cock shouts lustily; from farm to farm,

His cheery brothers, telling of the sun, Answer, till far away the joyance dies: We never knew before how God had filled

The summer air with happy living sounds;

All round us seems an overplus of life, And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still.

It is most strange, when the great miracle

Hath for our sakes been done, when we have had

Our inwardest experience of God, When with his presence still the room expands,

And is awed after him, that naught is changed,

That Nature's face looks unacknowledging,

And the mad world still dances heedless

on

Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after other lift their frowning masks,

And we behold the seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of God. With every anguish of our earthly part The spirit's sight grows clearer; this was

mon back

Ulysses' chances re-create ?
When, heralding life's every phase,
There glowed a goddess-veiling haze,
A plenteous, forewarning grace,
Like that more tender dawn that flies
Before the full moon's ample rise?
Methinks thy parting glory shines
Through yonder grove of singing pines;
At that elm-vista's end I trace
Dimly thy sad leave-taking face,
Eurydice! Eurydice !

The tremulous leaves repeat to me
Eurydice! Eurydice!

No gloomier Orcus swallows thee
Than the unclouded sunset's glow;
Thine is at least Elysian woe;
Thou hast Good's natural decay,
And fadest like a star away
Into an atmosphere whose shine
With fuller day o'ermasters thine,
Entering defeat as 't were a shrine;
For us,
- we turn life's diary o'er
To find but one word, - Nevermore.

Still lingered and gleamed in her hair;
For it was as wavy and golden,
And as many changes took,
As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples
On the yellow bed of a brook.

To what can I liken her smiling
Upon me, her kneeling lover,
How it leaped from her lips to her eye-
lids,

And.dimpled her wholly over,
Till her outstretched hands smiled also,
And I almost seemed to see
The very heart of her mother

Sending sun through her veins to me !

She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth,

And it hardly seemed a day, When a troop of wandering angels Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari

But loosed the hampering strings, And when they had opened her cagedoor,

My little bird used her wings.

But they left in her stead a changeling,

A little angel child,

That seems like her bud in full blossom,

And smiles as she never smiled: When I wake in the morning, I see it Where she always used to lie, And I feel as weak as a violet Alone 'neath the awful sky.

As weak, yet as trustful also ;

For the whole year long I see All the wonders of faithful Nature Still worked for the love of me; Winds wander, and dews drip earthward, Rain falls, suns rise and set, Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet.

This child is not mine as the first was,

I cannot sing it to rest,

I cannot lift it up fatherly

And bliss it upon my breast;