Alas!--the evil which we fain would shun
We do, and leave the wished-for good undone :
Our strength to-day
Is but to-morrow's weakness, prone to fall;
Poor, blind, unprofitable servants all
Are we alway.
Yet, who, thus looking backward o'er his years,
Feels not his eyelids wet with grateful tears,
If he hath been
Permitted, weak and sinful as he was,
To cheer and aid, in some ennobling cause,
His fellow-men?
If he hath hidden the outcast, or let in
A ray of sunshine to the cell of sin,-
If he hath lent
Strength to the weak, and, in an hour of need,
Over the suffering, mindless of his creed
Or home, hath bent.
He has not lived in vain, and while he gives
The praise to Him, in whom he moves and lives,
With thankful heart;
He gazes backward, and with hope before,
Knowing that from his works he never more
Can henceforth part.
I SHALL not soon forget that sight:
The glow of Autumn's westering day,
A hazy warmth, a dreamy light,
On Raphael's picture lay.
It was a simple print I saw,
The fair face of a musing boy;
Yet while I gazed a sense of awe
Seemed blending with my joy.
A simple print:--the graceful flow
Of boyhood's soft and wavy hair,
And fresh young lip and cheek, and brow
Unmarked and clear, were there.
Yet through its sweet and calm repose
I saw the inward spirit shine;
It was as if before me rose
The white veil of a shrine.
As if, as Gothland's sage has told,
The hidden life, the man within,
Dissevered from its frame and mould,
By mortal eye were seen.
Was it the lifting of that eye,
The waving of that pictured hand ?
Loose as a cloud-wreath on the sky,
I saw the walls expand.
The narrow room had vanished,-space
Broad, luminous, remained alone,
Through which all hues and shapes of grace
And beauty looked or shone.
Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought,
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought.
There drooped thy more than mortal face,
Oh Mother, beautiful and mild!
Enfolding in one dear embrace
Thy Saviour and thy Child!
The rapt brow of the Desert John ;
The awful glory of that day,
When all the Father's brightness shone
Through manhood's veil of clay.
And, midst gray prophet forms, and wil!
Dark visions of the days of old,
How sweetly woman's beauty smiled
Through locks of brown and gold!
There Fornarina's fair young face
Once more upon her lover shone,
Whose model of an angel's grace
He borrowed from her own.
Slow passed that vision from my view,
But not the lesson which it taught;
The soft, calm shadows which it threw
Still rested on my thought:
The truth, that painter, bard, and sage, Even in Earth's cold and changeful clime, Plant for their deathless heritage
The fruits and flowers of time.
We shape ourselves the joy or fear
Of which the coming life is made,
And fill our Future's atmosphere
With sunshine or with shade.
The tissue of the Life to be
We weave with colors all our own,
And in the field of Destiny
We reap as we have sown.
Still shall the soul around it call
The shadows which it gathered here,
And painted on the eternal wall
The Past shall reappear.
Think ye the notes of holy song
On Milton's tuneful ear have died? Think ye that Raphael's angel throng Has vanished from his side?
Oh no! We live our life again :
Or warmly touched or coldly dim
The pictures of the Past remain,-
Man's works shall follow him!
THEY tell me, Lucy, thou art dead—
That all of thee we loved and cherished,
Has with thy summer roses perished:
And left, as its young beauty fled,
An ashen memory in its stead--
The twilight of a parted day
Whose fading light is cold and vain:
The heart's faint echo of a strain
Of low, sweet music passed away.
That true and loving heart-that gift
Of a mind, earnest, clear, profound,
Bestowing, with a glad unthrift,
Its sunny light on all around,
Affinities which only could
Cleave to the pure, the true, and good;
And sympathies which found no rest,
Save with the loveliest and best.
Of them-of thee remains there nought
But sorrow in the mourner's breast ?-
A shadow in the land of thought?
No! Even my weak and trembling faith
Can lift for thee the veil which doubt
And human fear have drawn about
The all-awaiting scene of death.
Even as thou wast I see thee still;
And, save the absence of all ill,
And pain and weariness, which here
Summoned the sigh or wrung the tear,
The same as when, two summers back,
Beside our childhood's Merrimack,
I saw thy dark eye wander o'er
Stream, sunny upland, rocky shore,
And heard thy low, soft voice alone
'Midst lapse of waters, and the tone
Of pine leaves by the west-wind blown,
There's not a charm of soul or brow-
Of all we knew and loved in thee-
But lives in holier beauty now,
Baptized in immortality!
Not mine the sad and freezing dream
Of souls that, with their earthly mould,
Cast off the loves and joys of old-
Unbodied-like a pale moonbeam,
As pure, as passionless, and cold;
Nor mine the hope of Indra's son,
Of slumbering in oblivion's rest,
Life's myriads blending into one—
In blank annihilation blest;
Dust-atoms of the infinite-
Sparks scattered from the central light,
And winning back through mortal pain
Their old unconsciousness again.
No! I have FRIENDS in Spirit Land—-
Not ɛhadows in a shadowy band,
Not others, but themselves are they.
And still I think of them the same
As when the Master's summons came;
Their change-the holy morn-light breaking
Upon the dream-worn sleeper, waking—
A change from twilight into day.
They've laid thee midst the household graves, Where father, brother, sister lie;
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