shielded ruffians slay

The men who fain would win their own, the heroes of to-day !

Are we pledged to craven silence? fling it to the wind,

O,

The parchment wall that bars us from the least of human kind, That makes us cringe and temporize, and dumbly stand at rest, While Pity's burning flood of words is red-hot in the breast!

Though we break our fathers' promise, we have nobler duties first; The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed;

Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod,

Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!

We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, more,

To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit's core; Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so, but then

Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

He's true to God who's true to man;

wherever wrong is done, To the humblest and the weakest, 'neath the all-beholding sun,

That wrong is also done to us; and they are slaves most base,

Whose love of right is for themselves, and not for all their race.

God works for all. Ye cannot hem the hope of being free With parallels of latitude, with mountain-range or sea.

Put golden padlocks on Truth's lips, be callous as ye will, From soul to soul, o'er all the world, leaps one electric thrill.

Chain down your slaves with ignorance,

ye cannot keep apart, With all your craft of tyranny, the human heart from heart: When first the Pilgrims landed on the Bay State's iron shore, The word went forth that slavery should one day be no more.

creed our slaves shall go,

And signs to us are offered, as erst to

Pharaoh;

If we are blind, their exodus, like Israel's of yore,

Through a Red Sea is doomed to be, whose surges are of gore.

T is ours to save our brethren, with peace and love to win Their darkened hearts from error, ere they harden it to sin; But if before his duty man with listless spirit stands,

Erelong the Great Avenger takes the work from out his hands.

TO THE DANDELION. DEAR common flower, that grow'st beside the way,

Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,

First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold,

High-hearted buccaneers, o'erjoyed that they

An Eldorado in the grass have found, Which not the rich earth's ample round

May match in wealth, thou art more dear to me

Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be.

Gold such as thine ne'er drew the Spanish prow Through the primeval hush of Indian

seas,

Nor wrinkled the lean brow

Of age, to rob the lover's heart of ease; 'Tis the Spring's largess, which she

scatters now

To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand, Though most hearts never under

stand

To take it at God's value, but pass by The offered wealth with unrewarded eye.

Thou art my tropics and mine Italy; To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime; The eyes thou givest me Are in the heart, and heed not space or time:

THE GHOST-SEER.

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!

Writhing in its fiendish bliss; All night long he sees its eyes

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,

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. "T is 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, That, with eyes refusing light, Hooted from some hollow tree Of the world's idolatry. 'Tis his punishment to hear Sweep of eager 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 !

But enough! O, do not dare
From the next the veil to tear,
Woven of station, trade, or dress,
More obscene than nakedness,
Wherewith plausible culture drapes
Fallen Nature's myriad shapes!
Let us rather love to mark
How the unextinguished spark
Still gleams through the thin disguise
Of our customs, pomps, and lies,
And, not seldom blown to flame,
Vindicate its ancient claim.

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
Each mental nerve more fine than air,
O brain exact, that in thy scales
Canst weigh the sun and never err,

For once thy patient science fails, One problem still defies thy art; Thou never canst compute for her The distance and diameter

Of any simple human heart.

Sensation glimmers through its rest, It speaks unmanacled by words,

As full of motion as a nest That palpitates with unfledged birds; "T is 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,