Then one, still farther down,-this mournful troop
They carry on a bier hung round with frost.
The light is like a dying person's eye;
For, oh, our passèd years shall make us weep,
Nor shall our boyish years live but in dreams.

They say our home is in a better land,
That we are pilgrims here, and on this march
We shall stop never, but with soiled feet
Track the hard pavement with our dusty prints.
But yet to journey homeward were most fair,
And, no one knowing, burst upon their sight;—
'Thou art come!'-'Indeed is't thou from the far land?'
That joy was in their hearts. And, as the lake's
Calm surface is at once waked into life

By one slight move, so should my sudden sight
Arouse their peaceful feelings. So will't be
When some pure man makes of this world a home,
All home, both on new-years and birthdays, home;
And all the people laugh within their hearts

That this is City of God, both then and now.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.

The Journey.

A

THE FUTURE.

WANDERER is man from his birth.
He was born in a ship

On the breast of the river of Time;

Brimming with wonder and joy

He spreads out his arms to the light,

Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. Whether he wakes

Where the snowy mountainous pass,

Echoing the screams of the eagles,
Hems in its gorges the bed

Of the new-born clear-flowing stream;
Whether he first sees light

Where the river in gleaming rings
Sluggishly winds through the plain;
Whether in sound of the swallowing sea-
As is the world on the banks

So is the mind of the man.

Vainly does each as he glides

Fable and dream

Of the lands which the river of Time

Had left ere he woke on its breast,

Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed. Only the tract where he sails

He wots of only the thoughts,

Raised by the objects he passes, are his.

Who can see the green earth any more
As she was by the sources of Time?
Who imagines her fields as they lay
In the sunshine, unworn by the plough?
Who thinks as they thought,

The tribes who then roamed on her breast,
Her vigorous primitive sons?

What girl

Now reads in her bosom as clear
As Rebekah read, when she sate
At eve by the palm-shaded well ?
Who guards in her breast
As deep, as pellucid a spring
Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?

What bard,

At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul,

With a plainness as near,

As flashing, as Moses felt,

When he lay in the night by his flock
On the starlit Arabian waste?

Can rise and obey

The beck of the Spirit like him?

This tract which the river of Time
Now flows through with us, is the plain.
Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.
Bordered by cities, and hoarse

With a thousand cries is its stream.

And we on its breast, our minds

Are confused as the cries which we hear, Changing and shot as the sights which we see.

And we say that repose has fled

For ever the course of the river of Time.

That cities will crowd to its edge

In a blacker incessanter line;

That the din will be more on its banks,

Denser the trade on its stream,

Flatter the plain where it flows,
Fiercer the sun overhead.

That never will those on its breast
See an ennobling sight,

Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed.

Haply, the river of Time,

As it grows, as the towns on its marge

Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream---
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the grey expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with foam
As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast;
As the pale waste widens around him—
As the banks fade dimmer away—

As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream

Murmurs and scents of the infinite Sea.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

WHERE LIES THE LAND.

WHERE lies the land to which the ship would go ?

Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.

And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

On sunny noons, upon the deck's smooth face,
Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace;
Or, o'er the stern reclining, watch below
The foaming wake far-widening as we go.