Why, God would tire of all his heavens as soon
As thou, O godlike, childlike poet, didst,

Of daily and nightly sights of sun and moon!
And therefore hath He set thee in the midst,
Where men may hear thy wonder's ceaseless tune,
And praise His world for ever, as thou bidst.

HIRAM POWERS' GREEK SLAVE.

THEY say Ideal Beauty cannot enter

The house of anguish. On the threshold stands An alien Image with the shackled hands,

Called the Greek Slave: as if the artist meant her,
(That passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed, not darkened, where the sill expands)
To, so, confront man's crimes in different lands,
With man's ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
Art's fiery finger!—and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world! Appeal, fair stone,
From God's pure heights of beauty, against man's
wrong!

Catch up in thy divine face, not alone

East griefs but west, and strike and shame the

strong,

By thunders of white silence, overthrown.

LIFE.

EA

ACH creature holds an insular point in space: Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound, But all the multitudinous beings round

In all the countless worlds, with time and place
For their conditions, down to the central base,
Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound,
Life answering life across the vast profound,
In full antiphony, by a common grace!—
I think, this sudden joyaunce which illumes
A child's mouth sleeping, unaware may run
From some soul newly loosened from earth's
tombs:

I think, this passionate sigh, which, half-begun,

I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes

Of God's calm angel standing in the sun.

LOVE.

WE cannot live, except, thus, mutually,

We alternate, aware or unaware,

The reflex act of life: and when we bear
Our virtue outward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be

Most instantly compellant, certes, there,
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea.

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.

ETHINKS we do as fretful children do,

ME

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.

GOD would not let the spheric Lights accost

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.

BELOVED friend, who living many years

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.