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For sure, in Heaven's wide chambers, there is room
For love and pity, and for helpful deeds;
Else were our summons thither but a doom
To life more vain than this in clayey weeds.

From off the starry mountain-peak of song,
Thy spirit shows me, in the coming time,
An earth unwithered by the foot of wrong,
A race revering its own soul sublime.

What wars, what martyrdoms, what crimes, may

come,

Thou knowest not, nor I; but God will lead The prodigal soul from want and sorrow home, And Eden ope her gates to Adam's seed.

Farewell! good man, good angel now! this hand
Soon, like thine own, shall lose its cunning, too;
Soon shall this soul, like thine, bewildered stand,
Then leap to thread the free, unfathomed blue :

When that day comes, O, may this hand grow cold,
Busy, like thine, for Freedom and the Right;
O, may this soul, like thine, be ever bold

To face dark Slavery's encroaching blight!

This laurel-leaf I cast upon thy bier;

Let worthier hands than these thy wreath entwine;

Upon thy hearse I shed no useless tear,—
For us weep rather thou in calm divine!

TO THE MEMORY OF HOOD.

ANOTHER star 'neath Time's horizon dropped, To gleam o'er unknown lands and seas; Another heart that beat for freedom stopped,What mournful words are these!

O Love Divine, that claspest our tired earth, And lullest it upon thy heart,

Thou knowest how much a gentle soul is worth To teach men what thou art!

His was a spirit that to all thy poor
Was kind as slumber after pain:

Why ope so soon thy heaven-deep Quiet's door
And call him home again?

Freedom needs all her poets: it is they
Who give her aspirations wings,

And to the wiser law of music sway

Her wild imaginings.

Yet thou hast called him, nor art thou unkind, O Love Divine, for 'tis thy will

That gracious natures leave their love behind To work for Freedom still.

Let laurelled marbles weigh on other tombs,
Let anthems peal for other dead,

Rustling the bannered depth of minster-glooms
With their exulting spread.

His epitaph shall mock the short-lived stone,
No lichen shall its lines efface,

He needs these few and simple lines alone
To mark his resting-place :—

"Here lies a Poet. Stranger, if to thee
His claim to memory be obscure,

If thou wouldst learn how truly great was he, Go, ask it of the poor."

SONNETS.

I.

TO A. C. L.

THROUGH Suffering and sorrow thou hast passed
To show us what a woman true may be:
They have not taken sympathy from thee,
Nor made thee any other than thou wast,
Save as some tree, which, in a sudden blast,
Sheddeth those blossoms, that are weakly grown,
Upon the air, but keepeth every one

Whose strength gives warrant of good fruit at last:
So thou hast shed some blooms of gaiety,
But never one of steadfast cheerfulness;
Nor hath thy knowledge of adversity
Robbed thee of any faith in happiness,
But rather cleared thine inner eyes to see
How many simple ways there are to bless.

II.

WHAT were I, Love, if I were stripped of thee,
If thine eyes shut me out whereby I live,
Thou, who unto my calmer soul dost give
Knowledge, and Truth, and holy Mystery,
Wherein Truth mainly lies for those who see
Beyond the earthly and the fugitive,
Who in the grandeur of the soul believe,
And only in the Infinite are free?

Without thee I were naked, bleak, and bare
As yon dead cedar on the sea-cliff''s brow;
And Nature's teachings, which come to me now,
Common and beautiful as light and air,

Would be as fruitless as a stream which still
Slips through the wheel of some old ruined mill.

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