The weapons which your hands have found

Are those which Heaven itself has wrought, Light, Truth, and Love ;—your battle ground

The free, broad field of Thought.

No partial, selfish purpose breaks

The simple beauty of your plan, Nor lie from throne or altar shakes

Your steady faith in man.

The languid pulse of England starts

And bounds beneath your words of power, The beating of her million hearts

Is with you at this hour!

Oh, ye who, with undoubting eyes,

Through present cloud and gathering storm, Behold the span of Freedom's skies,

And sunshine soft and warm,

Press bravely onward !--not in vain

Your generous trust in human kind; The good which bloodshed could not gain

Your peaceful zeal shall find.

Press on !—the triumph shall be won

Of common rights and equal laws, The glorious dream of Harrington,

And Sidney's good old cause.

Blessing the cotter and the crown,

Sweetening worn Labor's bitter cup, And, plucking not the highest down,

Lifting the lowest up.

Press on !-and we who may not share

The toil or glory of your fight, May ask, at least, in earnest prayer,

God's blessing on the right!

THE QUAKER OF THE OLDEN TIME.

THE Quaker of the olden time!

How calm and firm and true,
Unspotted by its wrong and crime,

He walked the dark earth through
The lust of power, the love of gain,

The thousand lures of sin
Around him, had no power to stain

The purity within.

With that deep insight which detects

All great things in the small,
And knows how each man's life affects

The spiritual life of all,
He walked by faith and not by sight,

By love and not by law;
The presence of the wrong or right

He rather felt than saw.

He felt that wrong with wrong partakes,

That nothing stands alone,
That whoso gives the motive, makes

His brother's sin his own.
And, pausing not for doubtful choice

Of evils great or small,
He listened to that inward voice

Which called away from all.

Oh! Spirit of that early day,

So pure and strong and true, Be with us in the narrow way

Our faithful fathers knew.
Give strength the evil to forsake,

The cross of Truth to bear,
And love and reverent fear to make

Our daily lives a prayer!

THE REFORMER.

ALL grim and soiled and brown with tan,

I saw a Strong One, in his wrath,
Smiting the godless shrines of man

Along his path.
The Church beneath her trembling dome

Essayed in vain her ghostly charm:
Wealth shook within his gilded home

With strange alarm.

Fraud from his secret chambers fled

Before the sunlight bursting in : Sloth drew her pillow o'er her head

To drown the din.

“Spare,” Art, implored, “yon holy pile ;

That grand, old, time-worn turret spare ;" Meek Reverence, kneeling in the aisle,

Cried out, “Forbear!”

Gray-bearded Use, who, deaf and blind,

Groped for his old accustomed stone, Leaned on his staff, and wept, to find

His seat o'erthrown.

Young Romance raised his dreamy eyes,

O’erhung with paly locks of gold: " Why smite,” he asked in sad surprise,

“ The fair, the old ?”

Yet louder rang the Strong One's stroke,

Yet nearer flashed his axe’s gleam; Shuddering and sick of heart I woke,

As from a dream.

I looked : aside the dust-cloud rolled

The Waster seemed the Builder too; Up springing from the ruined Old

I saw the New

'Twas but the ruin of the badThe wasting of the wrong

and ill ; Whate’er of good the old time had

Was living still. Calm

grew the brows of him I feared;
The frown which awed me passed away,
And left behind a smile which cheered

Like breaking day.
The grain grew green on battle-plains,

O'er swarded war-mounds grazed the cow;
The slave stood forging from his chains

The spade and plough. Where frowned the fort, pavilions gay

And cottage windows, flower-entwined, Looked out upon the peaceful bay

And hills behind.

Through vine-wreathed cups with wine once red,

The lights on brimming crystal fell, Drawn, sparkling, from the rivulet head

And mossy well.

Through prison walls, like Heaven-sent hope,

Fresh breezes blew, and sunbeams strayed, And with the idle gallows-rope

The young child played. Where the doomed victim in his cell

Had counted o’er the weary hours, Glad school-girls, answering to the bell,

Came crowned with flowers.

VOL. I.

19

Grown wiser for the lesson given,

I fear no longer, for I know
That, where the share is deepest driven,

The best fruits grow.

The outworn rite, the old abuse,

The pious fraud transparent grown, The good held captive in the use

Of wrong alone, These wait their doom, from that great law

Which makes the past time serve to-day; And fresher life the world shall draw

From their decay.
Oh! backward-looking son of time !

The new is old, the old is new,
The cycle of a change sublime

Still sweeping through.

So wisely taught the Indian seer;

Destroying Seva, forming Brahm, Who wake by turns Earth's love and fear,

Are one, the same.

As idly as, in that old day,

Thou mournest, did thy sires repine,
So, in his time, thy child grown gray,

Shall sigh for thine.
Yet, not the less for them or thou

The eternal step of Progress beats
To that great anthem, calm and slow,

Which God repeats !
Take heart !—the Waster builds again-

A charmed life old goodness hath ;
The tares may perish—but the grain

Is not for death.