Its quiet only up against the ends Of wants and oppositions, loves and hates,

Where worked and worn by passionate debates,

And losing by the loss it apprehends, The flesh rocks round, and every breath it sends,

Is ravelled to a sigh. All tortured states Suppose a straightened place. Jehovah Lord,

Make room for rest, around me! Out of sight

Now float me, of the vexing land abhorred,

Till, in deep calms of space, my soul may right

Her nature shoot large sail on lengthening cord,

And rush exultant on the Infinite.

TWO SKETCHES.

I.

THE shadow of her face upon the wall May take your memory to the perfect Greek;

But when you front her, you would call the cheek

Too full, sir, for your models, if withal That bloom it wears could leave you critical,

And that smile reaching toward the rosy streak:

For one who smiles so, has no need to speak

To lead your thoughts along, as steed to stall!

A smile that turns the sunny side o' the heart

On all the world, as if herself did win By what she lavished on an open

mart

Let no man call the liberal sweetness, sin,

While friends may whisper, as they stand apart,

"Methinks there's still some warmer place within."

MOUNTAINEER AND POET

THE simple goatherd, between Alp and sky,

Seeing his shadow in that awful tryst,
Dilated to a giant's on the mist,

Esteems not his own stature larger by
The apparent image, but more patiently
Strikes his staff down beneath his
clenching fist-

While the snow-mountains lift their amethyst

And sapphire crowns of splendor, far and nigh,

Into the air around him. Learn from hence

Meek morals, all ye poets that pursue Your way still onward, up to eminence! Ye are not great, because creation drew Large revelations round your earliest

HIRAM POWERS' GREEK SLAVE. THEY say Ideal Beauty cannot enter The house of anguish. On the threshhold stands

An alien Image with enshackled hands, Called the Greek Slave: as if the artist meant her.

(That passionless perfection which he lent her,

Shadowed not darkened where the sill expands)

To, so, confront man's crimes in different lands

With man's ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,

Art's fiery finger!-and break up ere long

The serfdom of this world! Appeal, fair stone,

From God's pure heights of beauty, against man's wrong!

Catch up in thy divine face, not alone

East griefs but west,-and strike and shame the strong,

By thunders of white silence, overthrown.

LIFE.

EACH creature holds an insu.ar po.nt in space:

Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound,

But all the multitudinous beings round In all the countless worlds, with time and place

For their conditions, down to the central base,

Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound, Life answering life across the vast profound,

In full antiphony, by a common grace! I think, this sudden joyaunce which illumes

A child's mouth sleeping, unaware may

run

From some soul newly loosened from earth's tombs:

I think, this passionate sigh, which halfbegun

I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes

Of God's calm angel standing in the

sun.

LOVE.

We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life: and when we
bear

Our virtue onward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellant, certes, there
We live most life, whoever breathes
most air

And counts his dying years by sun and

sea.

But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth

Throw out her full force on another soul,

The conscience and the concentration both

Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole

And aim consummated, is Love in sooth, As nature's magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

HEAVEN AND EARTH,

And there was silence in heaven for the space of half-an-hour.'-Revelation.

GOD, who, with thunders and great voices kept

Beneath thy throne, and stars most silver-paced

Along the inferior gyres, and open-faced Melodious angels round;-caust intercept

Music with music;-yet, at will, has swept

All back, all back, (said he in Patmos placed,)

To fill the heavens with silence of the waste,

Which lasted half-an-hour !-Lo, I who have wept

All day and night, beseech thee by my

The life beyond us, and our souls in pain,

We miss the prospect which we're called

un to

By grief we're fools to use. Be still and strong,

O man, my brother! hold thy sobbing breath,

And keep thy soul's large window pure from wrong,

That so, as life's appointment issueth,
Thy vision may
be clear to watch along
The sunset consummation-lights of death

HUGH STUART BOYD.*

HIS BLINDNESS.

GOD would not let the spheric Lights

accost

This God-loved man, and bade the earth stand off

With all her beckoning hills, whose golden stuff

Under the feet of the royal sun is crossed.

Yet such things were to him not wholly lost,

Permitted, with his wandering eyes light-proof,

To have fair visions rendered full enough By many a ministrant accomplished ghost:

And seeing, to sounds of softly turned book-leaves,

Sappho's crown-rose, and Meleager's spring,

And Gregory's starlight on Greek-burnished eves:

To whom was inscribed, in grateful affection, my poem of Cyprus Wine.' There comes a moment in life when even gratitude and affection turn to pain, as they do now with me. This excellent and learned man, enthusiastic for the good and beautiful, and one of the most simple and upright of human beings, passed out of his long darkness through death in the summer of 1848; Dr. Adam Clarke's daughter and biographer, Mrs. Smith, (happier in this than the absent) fulfilling a double filial duty as she sat by the death bed of her father's friend and hers.