Kissing them with lips still sweet; One, mad roaring down the mountains, Stagnates at their feet.

"Is it choice whereby the Parsee
Kneels before his mother's fire ?
In his black tent did the Tartar
Choose his wandering sire?

"He alone, whose hand is bounding

Human power and human will, Looking through each soul's surrounding, Knows its good or ill.

"For thyself, while wrong and sorrow Make to thee their strong appeal, Coward wert thou not to utter

What the heart must feel.

"Earnest words must needs be spoken When the warm heart bleeds or burns With its scorn of wrong, or pity

For the wronged, by turns.

"But, by all thy nature's weakness,
Hidden faults and follies known,
Be thou, in rebuking evil,
Conscious of thine own.

"Not the less shall stern-eyed Duty

To thy lips her trumpet set,
But with harsher blasts shall mingle
Wailings of regret."

Cease not, Voice of holy speaking,

Teacher sent of God, be near, Whispering through the day's cool silence, Let my spirit hear!

So, when thoughts of evil-doers
Waken scorn, or hatred move,
Shall a mournful fellow-feeling
Temper all with love.

TO DELAWARE.

[Written during the discussion in the Legislature of that State, in the winter of 1846-47, of a bill for the abolition of slavery.}

THRICE Welcome to thy sisters of the East,

To the strong tillers of a rugged home, With spray-wet locks to Northern winds released,

And hardy feet o'erswept by ocean's foam;

West,

Whose harvest mantles, fringed with

prairie bloom,

Trail in the sunset, - O redeemed and

blest,

embraces,

Bone of their bone, and blood of their

own blood.

Red altars, kindling through that night of error,

Smoked with warm blood beneath the cruel eye

Of lawless Power and sanguinary Terror, Throned on the circle of a pitiless sky;

Beneath whose baleful shadow, overcasting

All heaven above, and blighting earth below,

The scourge grew red, the lip grew pale with fasting,

And man's oblation was his fear and woe !

Then through great temples swelled the dismal moaning

Of dirge-like music and sepulchral prayer;

Pale wizard priests, o'er occult symbols droning,

Swung their white censers in the burdened air:

As if the pomp of rituals, and the savor Of gums and spices could the Unseen One please;

As if his ear could bend, with childish favor,

To the poor flattery of the organ keys !

Feet red from war-fields trod the church aisles holy,

With trembling reverence: and the oppressor there, Kneeling before his priest, abased and lowly,

Crushed human hearts beneath his knee of prayer.

Not such the service the benignant Father Requireth at his earthly children's hands:

Not the poor offering of vain rites, but rather

The simple duty man from man demands.

For Earth he asks it: the full joy of Heaven

Knoweth no change of waning or increase;

Untroubled flows the river of his peace.

He asks no taper lights, on high surrounding

The priestly altar and the saintly grave, No dolorous chant nor organ music sounding,

Nor incense clouding up the twilight

125

broom,

And the lazy lout with his idle flail,

But he sweeps the floor and threshes the

corn,

In a low and husky asthmatic tone, With the stolid sameness of posture and

look

dawn.

The shade of Denmark fled from the sun, And the Cocklane ghost from the barnloft cheer,

The fiend of Faust was a faithful one,

Agrippa's demon wrought in fear, And the devil of Martin Luther sat By the stout monk's side in social chat.

The Old Man of the Sea, on the neck of him

Who seven times crossed the deep, Twined closely each lean and withered limb,

Like the nightmare in one's sleep. But he drank of the wine, and Sindbad cast The evil weight from his back at last.

But the demon that cometh day by day To my quiet room and fireside nook, Where the casement light falls dim and gray

On faded painting and ancient book, Is a sorrier one than any whose names Are chronicled well by good King James.

No bearer of burdens like Caliban,

No runner of errands like Ariel, He comes in the shape of a fat old man, Without rap of knuckle or pull of bell; And whence he comes, or whither he goes, I know as I do of the wind which blows.

The stout fiend darkens my parlor door; And reads me perchance the self-same lay Which melted in music, the night be

fore,

From lips as the lips of Hylas sweet, And moved like twin roses which zephyrs meet!

I cross my floor with a nervous tread,
I whistle and laugh and sing and shout,
I flourish my cane above his head,

And stir up the fire to roast him out; I topple the chairs, and drum on the pane, And press my hands on my ears, in vain!

I've studied Glanville and James the wise,

And wizard black-letter tomes which treat

Of demons of every name and size, Which a Christian man is presumed to meet,

But never a hint and never a line
Can I find of a reading fiend like mine.

I've crossed the Psalter with Brady and

Tate,

sweeter or better

E'er smoked from an oven or circled a platter !

Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,

Brighter eyes never watched o'er its baking, than thine!

And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express,

Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less,

That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below,

And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow,

And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky

Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie !

Of the fell demon following after !
The cautious goodman nails no more
A horseshoe on his outer door,
Lest some unseemly hag should fit
To his own mouth her bridle-bit,
The goodwife's churn no more refuses
Its wonted culinary uses
Until, with heated needle burned,
The witch has to her place returned!
Our witches are no longer old
And wrinkled beldames, Satan-sold,
But young and gay and laughing crea-
tures,

With the heart's sunshine on their features,

Their sorcery - the light which dances Where the raised lid unveils its glances; Or that low-breathed and gentle tone, The music of Love's twilight hours, Soft, dream-like, as a fairy's moan Above her nightly closing flowers,

LAND LEGEND."

How has New England's romance fled,
Even as a vision of the morning!
Its rites foredone, its guardians dead,
Its priestesses, bereft of dread,

Waking the veriest urchin's scorning! Gone like the Indian wizard's yell

And fire-dance round the magic rock, Forgotten like the Druid's spell

At moonrise by his holy oak! No more along the shadowy glen, Glide the dim ghosts of murdered men ; No more the unquiet churchyard dead Glimpse upward from their turfy bed,

Startling the traveller, late and lone; As, on some night of starless weather, They silently commune together,

Each sitting on his own head-stone ! The roofless house, decayed, deserted, Its living tenants all departed, No longer rings with midnight revel Of witch, or ghost, or goblin evil; No pale blue flame sends out its flashes Through creviced roof and shattered sashes!

The witch-grass round the hazel spring
May sharply to the night-air sing,

But there no more shall withered hags
Refresh at ease their broomstick nags,
Or taste those hazel-shadowed waters
As beverage meet for Satan's daughters;
No more their mimic tones be heard,
The mew of cat, the chirp of bird,

Along the charmed Ausonian shore !
Even she, our own weird heroine,
Sole Pythoness of ancient Lynn,

Sleeps calmly where the living laid her,
And the wide realm of sorcery,
Left by its latest mistress free,
Hath found no gray and skilled in-
vader :

So perished Albion's " glammarye," With him in Melrose Abbey sleeping, His charmed torch beside his knee, That even the dead himself might see

The magic scroll within his keeping. And now our modern Yankee sees Nor omens, spells, nor mysteries; And naught above, below, around, Of life or death, of sight or sound, Whate'er its nature, form, or look, Excites his terror or surprise, All seeming to his knowing eyes Familiar as his "catechize,' Or "Webster's Spelling-Book."

HAMPTON BEACH.

THE sunlight glitters keen and bright,
Where, miles away,

Lies stretching to my dazzled sight
A luminous belt, a misty light,
Beyond the dark pine bluffs and wastes
of sandy gray.

The tremulous shadow of the Sea !
Against its ground