O meek anticipant of that sure pain

Whose sureness gray-haired scholars hardly learn! What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain? What heavens, what earth, what suns, shalt thou dis

cern?

Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star,
Match that funereal aspect with her pall,

I think thou wilt have fathomed life too far,
Have known too much-

or else forgotten all.

The Guide of our dark steps, a triple veil
Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps ;
Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale
Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps.

Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labor's dull, Lethæan spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse

Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing;

And though thou glean, what strenuous gleaners may,
In the thronged fields where winning comes by strife;
And though the just sun gild, as mortals pray,
Some reaches of thy storm-vexed stream of life;

Though that blank sunshine blind thee; though the cloud

That severed the world's march and thine, be gone; Though ease dulls grace, and wisdom be too proud To halve a lodging that was all her own,

Once, ere thy day go down, thou shalt discern,
Oh, once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain !
Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return,
And wear this majesty of grief again.

A QUESTION.

TO FAUSTA.

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows
Like the wave;

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
Love lends life a little grace,

A few sad smiles; and then

Both are laid in one cold place, —

In the grave.

Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die
Like spring flowers;

Our vaunted life is one long funeral.
Men dig graves with bitter tears

For their dead hopes; and all,
Mazed with doubts and sick with fears,
Count the hours.

We count the hours! These dreams of ours,
False and hollow,

Do we go hence, and find they are not dead?
Joys we dimly apprehend

Faces that smiled and fled,

Hopes born here, and born to end,
Shall we follow ?

IN UTRUMQUE PARATUS.

IF, in the silent mind of One all-pure,
At first imagined lay

The sacred world; and by procession sure

From those still deeps, in form and color drest,
Seasons alternating, and night and day,

The long-mused thought to north, south, east, and west,
Took then its all-seen way;

Oh, waking on a world which thus-wise springs !
Whether it needs thee count

Betwixt thy waking and the birth of things
Ages or hours—oh, waking on life's stream!
By lonely pureness to the all-pure fount
(Only by this thou canst) the colored dream
Of life remount !

Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,

And faint the city gleams;

Rare the lone pastoral huts — marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, -
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone

Spring the great streams.

But, if the wild unfathered mass no birth
In divine seats hath known;

In the blank, echoing solitude, if Earth,
Rocking her obscure body to and fro,
Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,
Unfruitful oft, and at her happiest throe

Forms, what she forms, alone;

Oh, seeming sole to awake, thy sun-bathed head
Piercing the solemn cloud

Round thy still dreaming brother-world outspread!
O man, whom Earth, thy long-vexed mother, bare
Not without joy, · so radiant, so endowed
(Such happy issue crowned her painful care), -

Be not too proud!

Oh, when most self-exalted most alone,

Chief dreamer, own thy dream!

Thy brother-world stirs at thy feet unknown;
Who hath a monarch's hath no brother's part —
Yet doth thine inmost soul with yearning teem.
Oh, what a spasm shakes the dreamer's heart!
"I, too, but seem.”

THE WORLD AND THE QUIETIST.

TO CRITIAS.

"WHY, when the world's great mind
Hath finally inclined,

Why," you say, Critias, “be debating still?

Why, with these mournful rhymes
Learned in more languid climes,

Blame our activity

Who, with such passionate will,

Are what we mean to be?"

Critias, long since, I know

(For Fate decreed it so),

Long since the world hath set its heart to live;
Long since, with credulous zeal

It turns life's mighty wheel,
Still doth for laborers send

Who still their labor give,

And still expects an end.

Yet, as the wheel flies round,

With no ungrateful sound

Do adverse voices fall on the world's ear.

Deafened by his own stir,

The rugged laborer

Caught not till then a sense

So glowing and so near

Of his omnipotence.

So, when the feast grew loud

In Susa's palace proud,

A white-robed slave stole to the great king's side.

He spake the great king heard;

Felt the slow-rolling word

Swell his attentive soul;
Breathed deeply as it died,

And drained his mighty bowl.

THE SECOND BEST.

MODERATE tasks and moderate leisure,
Quiet living, strict-kept measure
Both in suffering and in pleasure,

'Tis for this thy nature yearns.

But so many books thou readest,
But so many schemes thou breedest,
But so many wishes feedest,

That thy poor head almost turns.

And (the world's so madly jangled,
Human things so fast entangled)
Nature's wish must now be strangled

For that best which she discerns.

So it must be! yet, while leading
A strained life, while over-feeding,
Like the rest, his wit with reading,

No small profit that man earns,