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Cheeks are pale, but hands are red,
Guiltless blood may chance be shed, .
But ye must and will be fed,
Hunger and Cold!

God has plans man must not spoil,
Some were made to starve and toil,
Some to share the wine and oil,
We are told:

Devil's theories are these,

Stifling hope and love and peace, Framed your hideous lusts to please, Hunger and Cold!

Scatter ashes on thy head,
Tears of burning sorrow shed,
Earth! and be by pity led
To Love's fold;

Ere they block the very door
With lean corpses of the poor,
And will hush for naught but gore,—
Hunger and Cold!

THE LANDLORD.

WHAT boot your houses and your lands? In spite of close-drawn deed and fence, Like water, 'twixt your cheated hands, They slip into the graveyard's sands

And mock your ownership's pretence.

How shall you speak to urge your right, Choked with that soil for which you lust? The bit of clay, for whose delight

You grasp, is mortgaged, too; Death might
Foreclose this very day in dust.

Fence as you please, this plain poor man,
Whose only fields are in his wit,
Who shapes the world, as best he can,
According to God's higher plan,

Owns you and fences as is fit.

Though yours the rents, his incomes wax
By right of eminent domain;
From factory tall to woodman's axe,
All things on earth must pay their tax,
To feed his hungry heart and brain.

He takes you from your-easy chair,
And what he plans, that you must do ;
You sleep in down, eat dainty fare,-
He mounts his crazy, garret-stair

And starves, the landlord over you

Feeding the clods your idlesse drains, You make more green six feet of soil; His fruitful word, like suns and rains, Partakes the seasons' bounteous pains, And toils to lighten human toil.

Your lands, with force or cunning got,
Shrink to the measure of the grave;
But Death himself abridges not
The tenures of almighty thought,
The titles of the wise and brave.

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TO A PINE-TREE.

FAR up on Katahdin thou towerest,
Purple-blue with the distance and vast;
Like a cloud o'er the lowlands thou lowerest,
That hangs poised on a lull in the blast,
To its fall leaning awful.

In the storm, like a prophet o'ermaddened,
Thou singest and tossest thy branches;
Thy heart with the terror is gladdened,
Thou forebodest the dread avalanches,

When whole mountains swoop valeward.

In the calm thou o'erstretchest the valleys
With thine arms, as if blessings imploring,
Like an old king led forth from his palace,
When his people to battle are pouring
From the city beneath him.

To the lumberer asleep 'neath thy glooming
Thou dost sing of wild billows in motion,
Till he longs to be swung 'mid their booming
In the tents of the Arabs of ocean,

Whose finned isles are their cattle.

For the gale snatches thee for his lyre,
With mad hand crashing melody frantic,
While he pours forth his mighty desire
To leap down on the eager Atlantic,

Whose arms stretch to his playmate.

The wild storm makes his lair in thy branches,
Preying thence on the continent under;
Like a lion, crouched close on his haunches,
There awaiteth his leap the fierce thunder,
Growling low with impatience.

Spite of winter, thou keep'st thy green glory,
Lusty father of Titans past number!
The snow-flakes alone make thee hoary,
Nestling close to thy branches in slumber,
· And thee mantling with silence.

Thou alone know'st the splendor of winter, 'Mid thy snow-silvered, hushed precipices, Hearing crags of green ice groan and splinter, And then plunge down the muffled abysses In the quiet of midnight.

Thou alone know'st the glory of summer, Gazing down on thy broad seas of forest, On thy subjects that send a proud murmur Up to thee, to their sachem, who towerest From thy bleak throne to heaven.

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