The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes;

The Law brooks not to have its solitudes
By bigot feet polluted; ---
Yet they who watch your God-com-
pelled return

May see your happy perihelion burn Where the calm sun his unfledged planets broods.

TO THE PAST.

WONDROUS and awful are thy silent halls,

O kingdom of the past! There lie the bygone ages in their palls, Guarded by shadows vast, There all is hushed and breathless, Save when some image of old error falls Earth worshipped once as deathless.

There sits drear Egypt, 'mid beleaguering sands,

Half woman and half beast, The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands

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 thy with ered 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 thy 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;

Wield still thy bent and wrinkled em

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

Of a century bursts full blossomed on the 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 recognizing start,

Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,

And glad Truth's yet mightier manchild 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,

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 Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to en

shield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the

beacon-moments see,

That, like peaks of some sunk conti

tinent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry

Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers,

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,

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,

Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,

Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;

Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,

And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,

Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,

By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track,

Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,

And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand Creds which in prophet-hearts hath

burned

Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven up turned.