For us, confessing all our need, Assured alone that Thou art good To each, as to the multitude, Eternal Love and Fatherhood, Weak, sinful, blind, to Thee we kneel, Stretch dumbly forth our hands, and feel Our weakness is our strong appeal. So, by these Western gates of Even Suffice it now. In time to be Shall holier altars rise to thee, Thy Church our broad humanity! White flowers of love its walls shall climb, Soft bells of peace shall ring its chime, Its days shall all be holy time. A sweeter song shall then be heard, The music of the world's accord Confessing Christ, the Inward Word! That song shall swell from shore to shore, One hope, one faith, one love, restore THOMAS STARR KING. THE great work laid upon his twoscore years Is done, and well done. If we drop our tears, Who loved him as few men were ever loved, We mourn no blighted hope nor broken plan With him whose life stands rounded and approved In the full growth and stature of a man. Mingle, O bells, along the Western slope, With your deep toll a sound of faith and hope! Wave cheerily still, O banner, half-way down, From thousand-masted bay and steepled town! Let the strong organ with its loftiest swell Lift the proud sorrow of the land, and tell That the brave sower saw his ripened grain. O East and West! O morn and sunset twain No more forever! has he lived in vain Who, priest of Freedom, made ye one, and told Your bridal service from his lips of gold? Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends To the pervading symphony of peace. No time is this for hands long over breath once more Freely and full. So, as yon harvesters Make glad their nooning underneath the elms With tale and riddle and old snatch of song, I lay aside grave themes, and idly turn The leaves of memory's sketch-book, dreaming o'er Old summer pictures of the quiet hills, And human life, as quiet, at their feet. And yet not idly all. A farmer's son, Proud of field-lore and harvest craft, and feeling All their fine possibilities, how rich man Makes labor noble, and his farmer's frock The symbol of a Christian chivalry Who clothes with grace all duty; still, | For them the song-sparrow and the I know whose panes Fluttered the signal rags of shiftlessness; Within, the cluttered kitchen-floor, unwashed (Broom-clean I think they called it); the best room Stifling with cellar damp, shut from the air In hot midsummer, bookless, pictureless Impossible willows; the wide-throated hearth Bristling with faded pine-boughs half concealing The piled-up rubbish at the chimney's back; And, in sad keeping with all things about them, Shrill, querulous women, sour and sullen bobolink Sang not, nor winds made music in the leaves; For them in vain October's holocaust Burned, gold and crimson, over all the hills, The sacramental mystery of the woods. Church-goers, fearful of the unseen Powers, But grumbling over pulpit-tax and pew. rent, Saving, as shrewd economists, their souls And winter pork with the least possible outlay Of salt and sanctity; in daily life Showing as little actual comprehension Of Christian charity and love and duty, As if the Sermon on the Mount had been Outdated like a last year's almanac : Rich in broad woodlands and in halftilled fields, And yet so pinched and bare and comfortless, The veriest straggler limping on his rounds, The sun and air his sole inheritance, Laughed at a poverty that paid its taxes, And hugged his rags in self-complacency! Not such should be the homesteads of a land Where whoso wisely wills and acts may dwell Home, and home loves, and the beati- | A man more precious than the gold of tudes Of nature free to all. Haply in years That wait to take the places of our own, Heard where some breezy balcony looks down On happy homes, or where the lake in the moon Sleeps dreaming of the mountains, fair as Ruth, In the old Hebrew pastoral, at the feet Of Boaz, even this simple lay of mine May seem the burden of a prophecy, Finding its late fulfilment in a change Slow as the oak's growth, lifting manhood up Through broader culture, finer manners, love, And reverence, to the level of the hills. O Golden Age, whose light is of the dawn, And not of sunset, forward, not behind, Flood the new heavens and earth, and with thee bring All the old virtues, whatsoever things Are pure and honest and of good repute, But add thereto whatever bard has sung Or seer has told of when in trance and dream They saw the Happy Isles of prophecy! Let Justice hold her scale, and Truth divide Between the right and wrong; but give the heart The freedom of its fair inheritance; Let the poor prisoner, cramped and starved so long, At Nature's table feast his ear and eye With joy and wonder; let all harmonies Of sound, form, color, motion, wait upon The princely guest, whether in soft attire Of leisure clad, or the coarse frock of toil, And, lending life to the dead form of faith, Give human nature reverence for the sake Of One who bore it, making it divine With the ineffable tenderness of God; Let common need, the brotherhood of prayer, The heirship of an unknown destiny, The unsolved mystery round about us, make Ophir. Sacred, inviolate, unto whom all things Should minister, as outward types and signs Of the eternal beauty which fulfils |