PHILIP JAMES BAILEY.

FROM FESTUS,' 20

FROM LUCIFER'S SERMON.

LUCIFER speaks.

COME, I'll unroll your hearts and read them to ye. To say ye live is but to say ye have souls,

That ye have paid for them and mean to play them,
Till some brave pleasure wins the golden stake,
And rakes it up to death as to a bank.

Ye live and die on what your souls will fetch;
And all are of different prices: therefore Hell
Cannot well bargain for mankind in gross;
But each soul must be purchased, one by one.
This it is makes men rate themselves so high:
While truly ye are worth little but to God
Ye are worth more than to yourselves. By sin
Ye wreak your spite against God that ye know
And knowing, will it. But I pray, I beg,
Act with some smack of justice to your Maker,
If not unto yourselves. Do! It is enough
To make the very Devil chide mankind

Such baseness, such unthankfulness! Why he
Thanks God he is no worse. You don't do that.

I

once,

say be just to God. Leave off these airs. Know your place -speak to God — and say, for Go first, Lord! Take your finger off your eye! It blocks the universe and God from sight. Think ye your souls are worth nothing to God? Are they so small? What can be great with God? What will ye weigh against the Lord? Yourselves? Bring out your balance: get in, man by man:

Add earth, heaven, hell, the universe; that's all.
God puts his finger in the other scale,

And up we bounce, a bubble. Nought is great

Nor small with God - for none but He can make
The atom indivisible, and none

But He can make a world: He counts the orbs,

He counts the atoms of the universe,

And makes both equal — both are infinite.
Giving God honor, never underrate

Yourselves after Him ye are everything.

But mind! God's more than everything; He is God. And what of me? No, us? no! I mean the Devil?

Why see ye not he goes before both you

And God? Men say ·

as proud as Lucifer

doors

Pray who would not be proud with such a train?
Hath he not all the honor of the earth?
Why Mammon sits before a million hearths
Where God is bolted out from every house.
Well might He say He cometh as a thief;
For He will break your bars and burst your
Which slammed against him once, and turn ye out,
Roofless and shivering, 'neath the doom-storm; Heaven
Shall crack above ye like a bell in fire,
And bury all beneath its shining shards.
He calls: ye hear not. Lo! he comes
No; ye are deaf as a dead adder's ear:
No; ye are blind as never bat was blind,
With a burning bloodshot blindness of the heart.
A swimming, swollen senselessness of soul.

ye see not.

A WISH.

FESTUS speaks.

FOR me, I care not what 's to come,

Nor for the fate by which I fall;

But I would that I were Ocean's son,

The solitary brave,

Like yon sea-snake to climb upon

The crest of the bounding wave.
Oh! happy, if at least I lie

Within some pearled and coral cave;
While overhead the booming surge

And moaning billow shall chant my dirge;
And the storms blast as it sweepeth by,
Shall, answering, howl to the mermaid's sigh,
And the night-wind's mournful minstrelsy,
Their requiem over my grave.

STUDENTS.

FESTUS speaks.

. . ALL mankind are students.

How to live

And how to die forms the great lesson still.

I know what study is: it is to toil

Hard, through the hours of the sad midnight watch,
At tasks which seem a systematic curse,

And course of bootless penance. Night by night,
To trace one's thought as if on iron leaves;
And sorrowful as though it were the mode
And date of death we wrote on our own tombs
Wring a slight sleep out of the couch, and see
The self-same moon, which lit us to our rest,
Her place scarce changed perceptibly in Heaven
Now light us to renewal of our toils.

This, to the young mind, wild and all in leaf,

Which knowledge, grafting, paineth. Fruit soon comes,
And more than all our troubles pays us powers;

So that we joyed to have endured so much :
That not for nothing have we slaved and slain
Ourselves almost. And more; it is to strive
To bring the mind up to one's own esteem:

Who but the generous fail? It is to think,

While thought is standing thick upon the brain

As dew upon the brow for thought is brain-sweat

And gathering quick and dark, like storms in summer,
Until convulsed, condensed, in lightning sport,

It plays upon the heavens of the mind,
Opens the hemisphered abysses here,
And we become revealers to ourselves.

GREAT THOUGHTS.

FESTUS speaks.

MAY you never

Regret those hours which make the mind, if they

Unmake the body; for the sooner we

Are fit to be all mind, the better. Blest

Is he whose heart is the home of the great dead,

And their great thoughts. Who can mistake great thoughts? They seize upon the mind

arrest, and search,

And shake it bow the tall soul as by wind

Rush over it like rivers over reeds,

Which quaver in the current ·

turn us cold,

And pale and voiceless; leaving in the brain

A rocking and a ringing, — glorious

But momentary, madness might it last,

And close the soul with Heaven as with a seal!

YOUTH.

FESTUS speaks.

THE night is glooming on us. It is the hour
When lovers will speak lowly, for the sake
Of being nigh each other; and when love
Shoots up the eye like morning on the east,