Like that Dawn's face which baffled Angelo,

Left shapeless, grander for its mystery, Thy great Design shall stand, and day Flood its blind front from Orients far away.

Who says thy day is o'er? Control,

My heart, that bitter first emotion;

While men shall reverence the steadfast soul,

The heart in silent self-devotion

Breaking, the mild, heroic mien,

Thou 'It need no prop of marble, Lamartine.

If France reject thee, 't is not thine,

But her own, exile that she utters;

Ideal France, the deathless, the divine,
Will be where thy white pennon flutters,

As once the nobler Athens went

With Aristides into banishment.

No fitting metewand hath To-day

For measuring spirits of thy stature, —

Only the Future can reach up to lay

The laurel on that lofty nature,

Bard, who with some diviner art

Hast touched the bard's true lyre, a nation's heart.

Swept by thy hand, the gladdened chords,

Crashed now in discords fierce by others,

Gave forth one note beyond all skill of words,
And chimed together, We are brothers.
O poem unsurpassed! it ran

All round the world, unlocking man to man.

France is too poor to pay alone

The service of that ample spirit; Paltry seem low dictatorship and throne, If balanced with thy simple merit.

They had to thee been rust and loss;

Thy aim was higher,— thou hast climbed a Cross.

A PARABLE.

SAID Christ our Lord, "I will go

and see

Ilow the men, my brethren, believe in me."
He passed not again through the gate of birth,
But made himself known to the children of earth.

Then said the chief priests, and rulers, and kings,
"Behold, now, the Giver of all good things;
Go to, let us welcome with pomp and state
Him who alone is mighty and great.”

With carpets of gold the ground they spread
Wherever the Son of Man should tread,

And in palace-chambers lofty and rare

They lodged him, and served him with kingly fare.

Great organs surged through arches dim
Their jubilant floods in praise of him,
And in church and palace, and judgment-hall,
He saw his image high over all.

But still, wherever his steps they led,

The Lord in sorrow bent down his head,
And from under the heavy foundation-stones,
The son of Mary heard bitter groans.

And in church and palace, and judgment-hall,
He marked great fissures that rent the wall,
And opened wider and yet more wide
As the living foundation heaved and sighed.

"Have

ye founded your thrones and altars, then,

On the bodies and souls of living men?

And think ye that building shall endure,

Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

"With gates of silver and bars of gold,

Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father's fold;

I have heard the dropping of their tears

In heaven, these eighteen hundred years."

"O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, through all our land.

"Our task is hard,— with sword and flame
To hold thy earth for ever the same,
And with sharp crooks of steel to keep
Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep."

Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set he in the midst of them,

And as they drew back their garment-hem,

For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he, "The images ye have made of me!"