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To thee the Martyr looketh, and his fires

Unlock their fangs and leave his spirit free; To thee the Poet mid his toil aspires,

And grief and hunger climb about his knee Welcome as children; thou upholdest

The lone Inventor by his demon haunted; The Prophet cries to thee when hearts are coldest,

And gazing o'er the midnight's bleak abyss,

Sees the drowsed soul awaken at thy kiss, And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted.

Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly
The guilty thinks it pity; taught by thee
Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith
blindly

Their own souls they were scarring; con

querors see

With horror in their hands the accursed spear

That tore the meek One's side on Calvary, And from their trophies shrink with ghastly fear;

Thou, too, art the Forgiver,

The beauty of man's soul to man revealing;
The arrows from thy quiver

Pierce error's guilty heart, but only pierce for
healing.

Oh, whither, whither, glory-winged dreams,
From out Life's sweat and turmoil would ye

bear me?

56

Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams,—
This agony of hopeless contrast spare me!
Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night!
He is a coward, who would borrow

A charm against the present sorrow
From the vague Future's promise of delight:
As life's alarums nearer roll,

The ancestral buckler calls,
Self-clanging from the walls

In the high temple of the soul;
Where are most sorrows, there the poet's
sphere is,

To feed the soul with patience,

To heal its desolations

With words of unshorn truth, with love that

1845.

never wearies.

83

James Russell Lowell.

ODE

Sung in the Town Hall, Concord,
July 4th, 1857

O TENDERLY the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire;

One morn is in the mighty heaven,

And one in our desire.

The cannon booms from town to town,
Our pulses beat not less,

The joy-bells chime their tidings down,
Which children's voices bless.

4

For He that flung the broad blue fold
O'er-mantling land and sea,

One third part of the sky unrolled
For the banner of the free.

The men are ripe of Saxon kind
To build an equal state,-
To take the statute from the mind
And make of duty fate.

United States! the ages plead,-
Present and Past in under-song,-
Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.

For sea and land don't understand,

Nor skies without a frown

See rights for which the one hand fights By the other cloven down.

Be just at home; then write your scroll

Of honor o'er the sea,

And bid the broad Atlantic roll,

A ferry of the free.

And henceforth there shall be no chain,

Save underneath the sea

The wires shall murmur through the main Sweet songs of liberty.

The conscious stars accord above,

The waters wild below,

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12

16

24

And under, through the cable wove,
Her fiery errands go.

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For He that worketh high and wise,
Nor pauses in his plan,

Will take the sun out of the skies

1136

Ere freedom out of man.

1140

1867.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

TO THE UNKNOWN EROS

WHAT rumour'd heavens are these!
Which not a poet sings, 4831 #

O, Unknown Eros? What this breeze
Of sudden wings

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To speak of whence they came, or whither they

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That moves me like the Child

Who in the flushing darkness troubled lies,
Inventing lonely prophecies,

169

Which even to his Mother mild

He dares not tell;

To which himself is infidel;

His heart not less on fire

20

With dreams impossible as wildest Arab Tale, (So thinks the boy,)

With dreams that turn him red and pale,

Yet less impossible and wild

Than those which bashful Love, in his own way and hour,

Shall duly bring to flower?

O, Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss,
What portent and what Delphic word,

Such as in form of snake forebodes the bird,
Is this?

In me life's even flood

What eddies thus?

What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood,

Like a perturbed moon of Uranus,

Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid;

And whence

This rapture of the sense

Which, by the whisper bid,

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Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental sign A bond I know not of nor dimly can divine; 4° This subject loyalty which longs

For chains and thongs

Woven of gossamer and adamant,

To bind me to my unguess'd want,
And so to lie,

Between those quivering plumes that thro' fine

ether pant,

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