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.

That grand, old, time-worn turret

spare";

And fresher life the world shall draw
From their decay.

O, backward-looking son of time!
The new is old, the old is new,
The cycle of a change sublime
Still sweeping through.

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So wisely taught the Indian seer; Destroying Seva, forming Brahm, Who wake by turns Earth's love and fear,

Are one, the same.

Idly as thou, in that old day

Thou mournest, did thy sire repine; So, in his time, thy child grown gray Shall sigh for thine.

But life shall on and upward go;

Th' 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.

God works in all things; all obey

His first propulsion from the night: Wake thou and watch!- the world is gray

With morning light!

THE PRISONER FOR DEBT.

Look on him!-through his dungeon grate

Feebly and cold, the morning light Comes stealing round him, dim and late,

As if it loathed the sight. Reclining on his strawy bed, His hand upholds his drooping head, His bloodless cheek is seamed and hard, Unshorn his gray, neglected beard; And o'er his bony fingers flow His long, dishevelled locks of snow.

No grateful fire before him glows,

And yet the winter's breath is chill; And o'er his half-clad person goes

The frequent ague thrill!
Silent, save ever and anon,
A sound, half murmur and half groa

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And so, for such a place of rest,

Old prisoner, dropped thy blood as rain

On Concord's field, and Bunker's crest,
And Saratoga's plain?

Look forth, thou man of many scars,
Through thy dim dungeon's iron bars;
It must be joy, in sooth, to see
Yon monument upreared to thee,
Piled granite and a prison cell,
The land repays thy service well!

Go, ring the bells and fire the guns,

And fling the starry banner out; Shout Freedom!" till your lisping

Think ye that prisoner's aged ear
Rejoices in the general cheer?
Think ye his dim and failing eye
Is kindled at your pageantry?
Sorrowing of soul, and chained of limb,
What is your carnival to him?

Down with the LAW that binds him thus !

Unworthy freemen, let it find No refuge from the withering curse Of God and human kind! Open the prison's living tomb, And usher from its brooding gloom The victims of your savage code To the free sun and air of God; No longer dare as crime to brand The chastening of the Almighty's hand.

The water which Samaria's outcast drew, Hath now his temples upon every shore, Altar and shrine and priest, and in

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cense dim Evermore rising, with low prayer and hymn, From lips which press the temple's marble floor,

Or kiss the gilded sign of the dread Cross He bore.

He woke. At once on heart and brain
The present Terror rushed again,
Clanked on his limbs the felon's chain !
He woke, to hear the church-tower tell
Time's footfall on the conscious bell,
And, shuddering, feel that clanging din
His life's LAST HOUR had ushered in ;
To see within his prison-yard,
Through the small window, iron barred,
The gallows shadow rising dim
Between the sunrise heaven and him,
A horror in God's blessed air,

A blackness in his morning light, Like some foul devil-altar there

Built up by demon hands at night. And, maddened by that evil sight, Dark, horrible, confused, and strange, A chaos of wild, weltering change, All power of check and guidance gone, Dizzy and blind, his mind swept on. In vain he strove to breathe a prayer,

In vain he turned the Holy Book, He only heard the gallows-stair

Creak as the wind its timbers shook. No dream for him of sin forgiven,

While still that baleful spectre stood,