Mr. Cobb took to the politico-journalistic field, and nearly all his endeavor has been put forth therein. Perhaps it is for this reason that his labors seem to him less fruitful than they should have been; for the field is large, and the really reform laborers very few. It is probable that politics never paid him for all his doing, inasmuch as politics never or seldom pays the honest reformer. Yet amid discouragements and defeats, through more than two decades of waiting for results, he has never actually lost faith, has never given up hope, has never grown cynical and old in the conflict. His heart is as young as ever, albeit he no longer expects immediate returns from work. An extract from one of his letters will show his present state of mind: "Now I think of man as he will be a few ages hence, after I am dust. The divine image is in him, and can not be altogether suppressed. He has sometimes given me a blow for my love, and I have paid him for it. Because he still loves to wallow I do not despair. Let us give him the benefit of a living hope in his capacity for improvement."

Circumstances, the outgrowth of a dominant idea, in part, have kept Mr. Cobb from cultivating the poetical side of his nature as he would otherwise have cultivated it. Rhythm was born in him earlier than reform, but became subservient to it. In his early childhood he improvised. As we have said, he began writing for publication when very young. But rhythmic expression was

largely foregone after the reform idea took such hold upon him. He wrote a dozen times as many poems at fifteen years of age as at twenty-five; and since then the poetic impulse has been yielded to very rarely. When he has written verse he has been strongly moved to it; and in the majority of such instances the effort has never seen the light of print. Among our papers we find the fol lowing:

THE SHIPS THAT SAIL AWAY.

I think of the ships that sail away,
The white-winged ships that sail away,
Freighted with fears and wasted tears,
And joys we gathered for long, long years,
For the possible rainy day.

I sleep, and dream of the white-winged ships
That glide from the shores of life away!
That swiftly glide with the ebbing tide,
Bearing my joys to the farther side,
Into the twilight gray.

O, ships that vanish into the past!
Are none to return to the port at last?
Shall I vainly wait at the seward gate
Beaten, and bruised, and scarred by fate,
Chilled by the winter blast?

The ships that carry my griefs-alas!
Have hulls of iron and shrouds of brass!
The storm's impact leaves them intact,
Though hurled on the jagged rocks of Fact,
Where fearful breakers mass!

Writing, with Mr. Cobb, is often less a matter of volition than compulsion. The poetic impulse is strong within him under the influence of either pain or pleasure. From his temperament he will take to rhythmic expression whenever hurt or pleased, or whenever by any means fervently wrought upon. "The World would be the Better for It" took form in his mind almost unbidden early one December morning in 1854, and rising he transcribed it, sent it to The Tribune, and it has been everywhere read, since. He obeyed the poetic impulse then, under the influence of love for the community. In the few verses last quoted his impulse was evidently influenced by some sharp thrust of disappointment, that left keen pain in the soul. The influence is less personal, but not quite hidden, in this poem published in The Tribune in 1866, entitled

DECEMBER.

Far down the somber-tinted North,

Where Argol leads his train of suns,

Gray Winter's herald issues forth

And casts his mantle as he runs.

So speeds he in his icy main;

His breath falls down in glitt'ring frost,

And like the sea-spray on the gale

His hoary, unbound locks are tost.

He smites the rivers and the lakes
His path is over plain and hill;

The night is past, and morning breaks
Upon the mountains, gray and chill.

O Summer, with your violet eyes!

O golden Autumn, many-sheaved!
Our griefs are voiced in sobs and sighs,
Like little children oft-bereaved.

O winds, perfumed with Summer flowers!
O fields, in Summer's emerald sheen!
O Summer birds, and Summer bowers,

O Summer days and nights serene!

We have but a few of Mr. Cobb's published poems before us from which to select, and therefore can only give such as illustrate his various styles of thought, without feeling any wise sure that either specimen given is the best of its kind which he has produced. The following was contributed to The Tribune just after the loss of an ocean steamer :

A SHIP SAILED OUT TO SEA.

Over the pathless deep

A thousand miles away,

Where spicy breezes sleep

To wake at shut of day,
A gallant ship went down-
A thousand fathoms down,

Beneath the waters blue--
Ship, passengers, and crew.

No eye beheld the wreck

Save the All-seeing Eye;
But, from the crowded deck
Went up a fearful cry,
Ere to their nameless graves

The clanking press rung out; Thus swept the months away; A year of awful doubt. No tdings!" nevermore To port on homeward shore, Will that good ship return, To comfort those who mourn?

And thus for many a bark,

With its immortal freight, In chill suspense and dark

Shall men in anguish wait,
The while they sadly say—
"Alas! they sailed away

Over the pathless main
And come not back again!"

Lost-lost at sea! and yet,

I see their phantom shapes

With gleaming sails all set,

Doubling the shadowy capes ;'