To them that wept and cursed Bull Run,
What was it but despair and shame?
Who saw behind the cloud the sun?
Who knew that God was in the flame?

Had not defeat upon defeat,

Disaster on disaster come, The slave's emancipated feet

Had never marched behind the drum. 20

There is a Hand that bends our deeds
To mightier issues than we planned,
Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds,
My country, serves Its dark command.

I do not know beneath what sky
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;

I only know it shall be high,

I only know it shall be great.

July, 1898.

AFTER BUSINESS HOURS

When I sit down with thee at last alone, Shut out the wrangle of the clashing day,

The scrape of petty jars that fret and fray,

The snarl and yelp of brute beasts for a bone;

When thou and I sit down at last alone, And through the dusk of rooms divinely gray

Spirit to spirit finds its voiceless way, As tone melts meeting in accordant tone,

Oh, then our souls, far in the vast of sky, Look from a tower, too high for sound of strife

10

Or any violation of the town, Where the great vacant winds of God go by,

And over the huge misshapen city of life Love pours his silence and his moonlight down.

The Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1898.

FROM "TALIESIN: A MASQUE"
Voices of Unseen Spirits

Here falls no light of sun nor stars;
No stir nor striving here intrudes;
No moan nor merry-making mars
The quiet of these solitudes.

GOOD FRIDAY NIGHT

At last the bird that sang so long In twilight circles, hushed his song: Above the ancient square

The stars came here and there.

Good Friday night! Some hearts were bowed,

But some amid the waiting crowd
Because of too much youth

Felt not the mystic ruth;

And of these hearts my heart was one:
Nor when beneath the arch of stone
With dirge and candle flame
The cross of passion came,

Did my glad spirit feel reproof,
Though on the awful tree aloof,
Unspiritual, dead,

Drooped the ensanguined Head.

To one who stood where myrtles made

A little space of deeper shade (As I could half descry,

A stranger, even as I),

I said, "These youths who bear along
The symbols of their Saviour's wrong,
The spear, the garment torn,
The flaggel, and the thorn,-

"Why do they make this mummery?
Would not a brave man gladly die
For a much smaller thing

Than to be Christ and king?"

1Ο

20

AN ODE IN TIME OF
HESITATION 1
I

Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made

To thrill the heedless passer's heart with

awe

And set here in the city's talk and trade To the good memory of Robert Shaw,

1 After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted negro regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. (Author's Note.)

By desert people immemorial
On Arizonan mesas shall be done
Dim rites unto the thunder and the sun;
Nor shall the primal gods lack sacrifice
More splendid, when the white Sierras
call

Unto the Rockies straightway to arise And dance before the unveiled ark of the 50

year, Sounding their windy cedars as for shawms,

Unrolling rivers clear

For flutter of broad phylacteries;
While Shasta signals to Alaskan seas
That watch old sluggish glaciers down-
ward creep

To fling their icebergs thundering from the steep,

And Maripose through the purple calms Gazes at far Hawaii crowned with palms Where East and West are met,

A rich seal on the ocean's bosom set 60 To say that East and West are twain, With different loss and gain :

The Lord hath sundered them; let them be sundered yet.