Still, down the stormy path, we hear
Their hero-voices ringing clear.

V

Who for their fellows live and die,
They the immortals are. O sigh
Not for their loss, but rather praise
The God that gave them to our days.

ON A CERTAIN "AGNOSTIC”

AGNOSTIC! Ah, what idle name for him
Who knew not the untruths of fables old,

Cherished in fear, or arrant ignorance;

Who knew not the shrewd structures of keen minds

Intent on their own shrewdness; losing quite

The inner truth in outward scaffoldings,

Cunning appearances, and schemes involved;
But who knew well the central verity:

That honest thought followed, without dismay,
Unto the bitter and accepted end,

Is the one way to wisdom in this world;

Who knew not creeds, but could not help but follow The feet of him who loved his fellow-men;

Who knew that human service is true life;

Who knew deep friendship, lived this knowledge out,
As few called "friends" have ever dared to live;
And who knew well the sacred truth of love.
Ah, call him not unknowing, for he knew
The truth of truth the gods can know no more.

"A WEARY WASTE WITHOUT HER"

"A WEARY waste without her?" Ah, but think! You who were blest with the most sweet, most near

WHERE SPRING BEGAN

Knowledge of that high nature; who could drink At her fresh spirit's fountain, year by yearWhat were the past without her? And her dear Image and memory - did they, too, sink

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Into the abyss? - Herself was yours, and here Still lives remembrance; a bright, golden link 'Twixt this, the visible world, and the unknown Toward which we journey where she now doth live, Close to the Eternal One. Make thou no moan; What else may pass, this twofold gift endures;

Give thanks, and mourn not, then. - But, O, forgive! How can I chide who mix my tears with yours?

THE POET'S SLEEP

In spite of it all I am going to sleep. Put out the lights.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

EVER when slept the poet his dreams were music,
And in sweet song lived the dear dream once more.
So when from sleep and dreams again he wakes,—
Out from the world of symbols passing forth
Into that spirit-world where all is real,—
What memoried music, new and exquisite,
Shall strike on ears celestial - where he walks
Reverent among the immortal melodists!

WHERE SPRING BEGAN

THE days were cold, and clouded. On a day
Before the seasonable warmth and sun

The poet died. We bore him to the tomb

And, under wreaths and flowers, we laid him down. Then came a burst of sunshine. Bright it poured On the banked blossoms and the leafless trees. There, at the poet's grave, the spring began.

AVARICE

THEY said, "God made him," ah, the clean, great God!
Perhaps! Even as He made the loathèd beast
Whose use is to take offal for his feast;

As He made viper and vermin or, at a nod,
Made hell, to do some necessary part

In His wide-stretched, inscrutable universe.
Yes, haply God imagined him for a curse,
A scourge, a vengeance; with slow, patient art
Him did He fashion cunningly; saying: "This
My sign and warning, to time's distant end,
That all a loveless life is may be known,
And desolate horror of pure avarice;

The world is his, a world without a friend,
Without one friend an honest man would own.”

PITY THE BLIND

I

"PITY the blind!" Yes, pity those

Whom day and night inclose

In equal dark; to whom the sun's keen flame
And pitchy night-time are the same.

II

But pity most the blind

Who cannot see

That to be kind

Is life's felicity.

PROOF OF SERVICE

THOU who wouldst serve thy country and thy kind,

Winning the praise of honorable men

BLAME

And love of many hearts

- know the true proof

Of faithfulness lies not therein. That dwells
In the lone consciousness of duty done,
And in the scorn and contumely of souls
Self-soiled with sin: the necessary hate
Of perjured and contaminated spirits

For that whose mere existence brings reproach,
Shame, and despair for something lost forever.
When thou hast won the hatred of the vile,
Then know thou hast served well thy fellow-men.

CONQUERED

In thine anger it was said:

"Would that mine enemy were dead."

Or, if thou saidest naught,

That was thy thought.

Now thou cryest, night and day:

"Mine enemy hath conquered in our fight, In that he fled away.

Into the darkness and the night,

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Ere I to justice wakened and the right.
Now this through all the anguished hours I say,
As with my soul my soul doth strive:
Would God mine enemy were alive!"

BLAME

(A MEMORY OF EISLEBEN, THE PLACE OF LUTHER'S BIRTH AND DEATH)

IN a far, lonely land at last I came

Unto a town made great by one great fame.
Born here, here died the noblest of his time,
Whose memory makes his century sublime.

But, O my God! I was not happy there,

For down below, in dark and caverned air,
Outstretched and cramped, the pallid miners lay.
Their shortened lives, their absence from the day,
Burdened my spirit with a sense of blame.

IN the House of State at Albany,- in shadowy corridors and corners,— the whisperers whispered together. In sumptuous palaces in the great city men talked intently, with mouth to ear.

Year in and year out they whispered, and talked, and no one heard save those who listened close.

Now in the Hall of the City the whisperers again are whispering, the talkers are talking.

what

They who once conversed so quietly, secretly, with shrugs and winks and finger laid beside nose has happened to their throats?

For speak they never so low, their voices are as the voices of trumpets; whisper they never so close, their words are like alarm bells rung in the night.

Every whisper is a shout, and the noise of their speech goes forth like thunders.

They cry as from the housetops - their voices resound up and down the streets; they echo from village to village and from city to city.

Over prairies and mountains and across the salt sea their whispers go hissing and shouting.

They say the thing they would not say, and quickly the shameful thing clamors back and forth over the round world;