But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration, both,
Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As nature's magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

HEAVEN AND EARTH.

"And there was silence in heaven for the space of half-an-hour."

Revelation.

GOD, who, with thunders and great voices kept

Beneath thy throne, and stars most silver-paced Along the inferior gyres, and open-faced Melodious angels round;-canst intercept Music with music;-yet, at will, hast swept All back, all back, (said he in Patmos placed,) To fill the heavens with silence of the waste, Which lasted half-an-hour!-Lo, I, who have wept All day and night, beseech Thee, by my tears, And by that dread response of curse and groan Men alternate across these hemispheres, Vouchsafe us such a half-hour's hush alone, In compensation for our noisy years!

As heaven has paused from song, let earth, from moan.

THE PROSPECT.

METHINKS we do as fretful children do,
Leaning their faces on the window-pane

To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's stain,
And shut the sky and landscape from their view.
And thus, alas! since God the maker drew
A mystic separation 'twixt those twain,
The life beyond us, and our souls in pain,
We miss the prospect which we're called unto,
By grief we're fools to use.
Be still and strong,

O man, my brother! hold thy sobbing breath,
And keep thy soul's large window pure from

wrong,

That so, as life's appointment issueth,

Thy vision may be clear to watch along
The sunset consummation-lights of death.

HUGH STUART BOYD.*

HIS BLINDNESS.

OD would not let the spheric Lights accost

GOD

This God-loved man, and bade the earth stand off With all her beckoning hills, whose golden stuff Under the feet of the royal sun is crossed.

* To whom was inscribed, in grateful affection, my poem of " Cyprus Wine." There comes a moment in life when even gratitude and affection turn to pain, as they do now with me. This excellent and learned man, enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and one of the most

Yet such things were, to him, not wholly lost,-
Permitted, with his wandering eyes light-proof,
To have fair visions rendered full enough
By many a ministrant accomplished ghost:
And seeing, to sounds of softly-turned book-leaves,
Sappho's crown-rose, and Meleager's spring,
And Gregory's starlight, on Greek-burnished eves:
Till Sensual and Unsensual seemed one thing
Viewed from one level;-earth's reapers at the
sheaves,

Not plainer than Heaven's angels marshalling!

HUGH STUART BOYD.

HIS DEATH, 1848.

ELOVED friend, who living many years

BEL

With sightless eyes raised vainly to the sun,
Didst learn to keep thy patient soul in tune
To visible nature's elemental cheers!

God has not caught thee to new hemispheres
Because thou wast aweary of this one:-
I think thine angel's patience first was done,
And that he spake out with celestial tears,

simple and upright of human beings, passed out of his long darkness through death in the summer of 1848; Dr. Adam Clarke's daughter and biographer, Mrs. Smith, (happier in this than the absent) fulfilling a double filial duty as she sate by the death-bed of her father's friend and hers.

"Is it enough, dear God? then lighten so This soul that smiles in darkness!"

Stedfast friend,

Who never didst my heart or life misknow,
Nor either's faults too keenly apprehend,—
How can I wonder when I see thee go
To join the Dead, found faithful to the end?

HUGH STUART BOYD.

LEGACIES.

THREE gifts the Dying left me; Æschylus,
And Gregory Nazianzen, and a clock

Chiming the gradual hours out like a flock
Of stars, whose motion is melodious.

The books were those I used to read from, thus
Assisting my dear teacher's soul to unlock

The darkness of his eyes: now, mine they mock,
Blinded in turn, by tears: now, murmurous
Sad echoes of my young voice, years agone,
Entoning, from these leaves, the Græcian phrase,
Return and choke my utterance. Books, lie down
In silence on the shelf within my gaze!
And thou, clock, striking the hour's pulses on,
Chime in the day which ends these parting days!

FUTURE AND PAST.

MY future will not copy fair my past.

I wrote that once; and, thinking at my side My ministering life-angel justified

The word by his appealing look upcast
To the white throne of God, I turned at last,
And saw instead there, thee; not unallied
To angels in thy soul! Then I, long tried
By natural ills, received the comfort fast,
While budding at thy sight, my pilgrim's staff
Gave out green leaves with morning dews impearled.
-I seek no copy now of life's first half!

Leave here the pages with long musing curled,
And write me new my future's epigraph,

New angel mine, unhoped for in the world!