Like the spring that gushed in Newbury Street,

Under the tramp of the earthquake's

feet,

A silver shaft in the air and light,
For a single day, then lost in night,
Leaving only, its place to tell,
Sandy fissure and sulphurous smell.
With zeal wing-clipped and white-heat
cool,

Moved by the spirit in grooves of rule, No longer harried, and cropped, and fleeced,

Flogged by sheriff and cursed by priest,
But by wiser counsels left at ease
To settle quietly on his lees,

And, self-concentred, to count as done The work which his fathers scarce begun,

In silent protest of letting alone,
The Quaker kept the way of his own, -
A non-conductor among the wires,
With coat of asbestos proof to fires.
And quite unable to mend his pace
To catch the falling manna of grace,
He hugged the closer his little store
Of faith, and silently prayed for more.
And vague of creed and barren of rite,
But holding, as in his Master's sight,
Act and thought to the inner light,
The round of his simple duties walked,
And strove to live what the others talked.

In the war which Truth or Freedom wages

With impious fraud and the wrong

ages

Hate and malice and self-love mar
The notes of triumph with painful jar,
And the helping angels turn aside
Their sorrowing faces the shame to hide.
Never on custom's oiléd grooves
The world to a higher level moves,
But grates and grinds with friction hard
On granite boulder and flinty shard.
The heart must bleed before it feels,
The pool be troubled before it heals;
Ever by losses the right must gain,
Every good have its birth of pain;
The active Virtues blush to find
The Vices wearing their badge behind,
And Graces and Charities feel the fire
Wherein the sins of the age expire;
The fiend still rends as of old he rent
The tortured body from which he went.

Old friends embraced, long held apart By evil counsel and pride of heart; And penitence saw through misty tears, In the bow of hope on its cloud of fears, The promise of Heaven's eternal years,

The peace of God for the world's annoy,

Beauty for ashes, and oil of joy!

Under the church of Federal Street, Under the tread of its Sabbath feet, Walled about by its basement stones, Lie the marvellous preacher's bones. No saintly honors to them are shown, No sign nor miracle have they known; But he who passes the ancient church Stops in the shade of its belfry-porch, And ponders the wonderful life of him Who lies at rest in that charnel dim. Long shall the traveller strain his eye From the railroad car, as it plunges by, And the vanishing town behind him search

For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church;

And feel for one moment the ghosts of trade,

And fashion, and folly, and pleasure

laid,

By the thought of that life of

tent,

That voice of warning yet eloquent,
Of one on the errands of angels sent.
And if where he labored the flood of sin
Like a tide from the harbor-bar sets in,
And over a life of time and sense
The church-spires lift their vain de-
fence,

As if to scatter the bolts of God
With the points of Calvin's thunder-

rod,

Still, as the gem of its civic crown, Precious beyond the world's renown, His memory hallows the ancient town!

THE QUAKER ALUMNI.70

FROM the well-springs of Hudson, the sea-cliffs of Maine,

Grave men, sober matrons, you gather again;

309

And, with hearts warmer grown as your heads grow more cool, Play over the old game of going to school.

All your strifes and vexations, your whims and complaints,

(You were not saints yourselves, if the children of saints!)

All your petty self-seekings and rivalries done,

Round the dear Alma Mater your hearts beat as one!

How widely soe'er you have strayed from the fold,

Though your "thee" has grown "you," and your drab blue and gold, To the old friendly speech and the garb's sober form,

Like the heart of Argyle to the tartan,

you warm.

But, the first greetings over, you glance round the hall;

Your hearts call the roll, but they answer not all:

Through the turf green above them the dead cannot hear;

Name by name, in the silence, falls sad as a tear!

In love, let us trust, they were summoned so soon

From the morning of life, while we toil through its noon;

They were frail like ourselves, they had needs like our own, And they rest as we rest in God's mercy alone.

Unchanged by our changes of spirit and frame,

Past, now, and henceforward the Lord is the same;

Though we sink in the darkness, his arms break our fall,

And in death as in life, he is Father of all!

We are older: our footsteps, so light in the play

Of the far-away school-time, move slower to-day;

310

Here a beard touched with frost, there a bald, shining crown, And beneath the cap's border gray mingles with brown.

But faith should be cheerful, and trust should be glad,

And our follies and sins, not our years, make us sad.

Should the heart closer shut as the bonnet grows prim,

And the face grow in length as the hat grows in brim?

Life is brief, duty grave; but, with rainfolded wings,

Of yesterday's sunshine the grateful heart sings;

And we, of all others, have reason to pay

The tribute of thanks, and rejoice on

our way;

For the counsels that turned from the follies of youth;

For the beauty of patience, the whiteness of truth;

For the wounds of rebuke, when love

tempered its edge;

For the household's restraint, and the discipline's hedge;

For the lessons of kindness vouchsafed to the least

Of the creatures of God, whether human or beast,

Bringing hope to the poor, lending strength to the frail,

In the lanes of the city, the slave-hut, and jail ;

For a womanhood higher and holier, by all

Her knowledge of good, than was Eve ere her fall,

Whose task-work of duty moves lightly as play,

Serene as the moonlight and warm as the day;

And, yet more, for the faith which embraces the whole,

Of the creeds of the ages the life and the soul,

Wherein letter and spirit the same channel run,

And man has not severed what God has made one !

For a sense of the Goodness revealed everywhere,

As sunshine impartial, and free as the air;

For a trust in humanity, Heathen or Jew,

And a hope for all darkness The Light shineth through.

Who scoffs at our birthright? - the words of the seers,

And the songs of the bards in the twilight of years,

All the foregleams of wisdom in santon and sage,

In prophet and priest, are our true heritage.

The Word which the reason of Plato discerned;

The truth, as whose symbol the Mithrafire burned;

The soul of the world which the Stoic but guessed,

In the Light Universal the Quaker confessed!

No honors of war to our worthies belong;

Their plain stem of life never flowered into song;

But the fountains they opened still gush by the way,

And the world for their healing is bet ter to-day.

He who lies where the minster's groined arches curve down To the tomb-crowded transept of England's renown, The glorious essayist, by genius enthroned,

Whose pen as a sceptre the Muses all owned,

Who through the world's pantheon walked in his pride, Setting new statues up, thrusting old ones aside,

While we sport with the mosses and pebbles ashore,

They lessen and fade, and we see them

no more.

Forgive me, dear friends, if my vagrant thoughts seem

Like a school-boy's who idles and plays with his theme.

Forgive the light measure whose changes display

The sunshine and rain of our brief April day.

There are moments in life when the lip and the eye

Try the question of whether to smile or to cry;

And scenes and reunions that prompt like our own

The tender in feeling, the playful in tone.

I, who never sat down with the boys and the girls

At the feet of your Slocums, and Cartlands, and Earles,

By courtesy only permitted to lay On your festival's altar my poor gift, to-day,

I would joy in your joy: let me have a friend's part

In the warmth of your welcome of hand and of heart,

On your play-ground of boyhood unbend the brow's care,

And shift the old burdens our shoulders must bear.

Long live the good School! giving out year by year

Recruits to true manhood and womanhood dear:

Brave boys, modest maidens, in beauty sent forth,

The living epistles and proof of its worth!

In and out let the young life as steadily flow

As in broad Narragansett the tides come and go;

And its sons and its daughters in prairie

and town

Remember its honor, and guard its re

nov'n.