Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,

And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,

How weakly understood

Thy great commanded good,

Then, fatherly not less

Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,

Thou 'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,

"I will be sorry for their childishness."

THE TWO DESERTS

Not greatly mov'd with awe am I To learn that we may spy

Five thousand firmaments beyond our own. The best that's known

Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small.

View'd close, the Moon's fair ball

Is of ill objects worst,

A corpse in Night's highway, naked, firescarr'd, accurst;

And now they tell

That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and

burst

Too horribly for hell.

So, judging from these two,

As we must do,

The Universe, outside our living Earth, Was all conceiv'd in the Creator's mirth, Forecasting at the time Man's spirit deep, To make dirt cheap.

Put by the Telescope !

Better without it man may see, Stretch'd awful in the hush'd midnight, The ghost of his eternity.

SAY, did his sisters wonder what could
Joseph see

In a mild, silent little Maid like thee?
And was it awful, in that narrow house,
With God for Babe and Spouse?
Nay, like thy simple, female sort, each one
Apt to find Him in Husband and in Son,
Nothing to thee came strange in this.
Thy wonder was but wondrous bliss:
Wondrous, for, though

True Virgin lives not but does know,
(Howbeit none ever yet confess'd,)
That God lies really in her breast,
Of thine He made His special nest!
And so

All mothers worship little feet,
And kiss the very ground they've trod;
But, ah, thy little Baby sweet
Who was indeed thy God!

sign'd,

Lay phials, scent, a novel and a Bible,
A pill box, and a wine glass, and a book
On the Apocalypse; for she was much
Addicted unto physic and religion,
And her physician had prescrib'd for her
Jellies and wines and cheerful Literature.
The Book on the Apocalypse was writ
By her chosen pastor, and she took the
novel

With the dry sherry, and the pills prescrib'd.

A gorgeous, pious, comfortable life
Of misery she lived; and all the sins

Of all her house, and all the nation's sins,
And all shortcomings of the Church and
State,

And all the sins of all the world beside, Bore as her special cross, confessing them Vicariously day by day, and then

She comforted her heart, which needed it, With bric-a-brac and jelly and old wine.

Beside the fire, her elbow on the mantel, And forehead resting on her finger-tips, Shading a face where sometimes loom'd a frown,

And sometimes flash'd a gleam of bitter

It was not noble, and despise it all,
And most herself for making it her all.
A woman, complex, intricate, involv'd;
Wrestling with self, yet still by self sub-
dued ;

Scorning herself for being what she was,
And yet unable to be that she would;
Uneasy with the sense of possible good
Never attain'd, nor sought, except in fits
Ending in failures; conscious, too, of power
Which found no purpose to direct its force,
And so came back upon herself, and grew
An inward fret. The caged bird some-
times dash'd

Against the wires, and sometimes sat and pin'd,

But mainly peck'd her sugar, and eyed her glass,

And trill'd her graver thoughts away in song.

Mother and daughter-yet a childless mother,

And motherless her daughter; for the world

Had gash'd a chasm between, impassable, And they had nought in common, neither

love,

Nor hate, nor anything except a name. Yet both were of the world; and she not least

Whose world was the religious one, and stretch'd

A kind of isthmus 'tween the Devil and God,

A slimy, oozy mud, where mandrakes grew, Ghastly, with intertwisted roots, and things Amphibious haunted, and the leathern bat Flicker'd about its twilight evermore.

THE SELF-EXILED

THERE came a soul to the gate of Heaven
Gliding slow-

A soul that was ransom'd and forgiven,
And white as snow :
And the angels all were silent.

A mystic light beam'd from the face
Of the radiant maid,
But there also lay on its tender grace
A mystic shade :

And the angels all were silent.