A VESTAL priestess, proudly pure,
But of a meek and quiet spirit;
With soul all dauntless to endure,
And mood so calm that naught can stir it,
Save when a thought most deeply thrilling
Her eyes with gentlest tears is filling,
Which seem with her true words to start
From the deep fountain at her heart.
A mien that neither seeks nor shuns
The homage scattered in her way;
A love that hath few favoured ones,
And yet for all can work and pray;
A smile wherein each mortal reads
The very sympathy he needs;
An eye like to a mystic book
Of lays that bard or prophet sings,
Which keepeth for the holiest look
Of holiest love its deepest things.
A form to which a king had bent,
The fireside's dearest ornament—
Known in the dwellings of the poor
Better than at the rich man's door;
A life that ever onward goes,
Yet in itself has deep repose.
A vestal priestess, maid, or wife—
Vestal, and vowed to offer up
The innocence of a holy life
To Him who gives the mingled cup;
With man its bitter sweets to share,
To live and love, to do and dare;
His prayer to breathe, his tears to shed,
Breaking to him the heavenly bread
Of hopes which, all too high for earth,
Have yet in her a mortal birth.
This is the woman I have dreamed,
And to my childish thought she seemed
The woman I myself should be:
Alas! I would that I were she.
AKE the dead CHRIST to my chamber
The CHRIST I brought from Rome;
Over all the tossing ocean,
He has reached His Western home:
Bear Him as in procession,
And lay Him solemnly
Where, through weary night and morning,
He shall bear me company.
The name I bear is other
Than that I bore by birth;
And I've given life to children,
Who'll grow and dwell on earth;
But the time comes swiftly towards me-
Nor do I bid it stay—
When the dead CHRIST will be more to me
Than all I hold to-day.
Lay the dead CHRIST beside me—
Oh, press Him to my heart!
I would hold him long and painfully,
Till the weary tears should start—
Till the divine contagion
Heal me of self and sin,
And the cold weight press wholly down.
The pulse that chokes within.
Reproof and frost, they fret me;
Toward the free, the sunny lands,
From the chaos of existence,
I stretch these feeble hands
And, penitential, kneeling,
Pray God would not be wroth,
Who gave not the strength of feeling
And strength of labour both.
Thou'rt but a wooden carving,
Defaced of worms, and old;
Yet more to me Thou couldst not be
Wert Thou all wrapped in gold
Like the gem-bedizened baby
Which, at the Twelfth-day noon,
They show from the Ara Cœli's steps
To a merry dancing-tune.
I ask of Thee no wonders-
No changing white or red;
I dream not Thou art living,
I love and prize Thee dead.
That salutary deadness
I seek through want and pain,
From which God's own high power can bid
Our virtue rise again.
ACT FOR TRUTH.
THE busy world shoves angrily aside
The man who stands with arms akimbo set,
Until occasion tells him what to do;
And he who waits to have his task marked out,
Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled.
Our time is one that calls for earnest deeds:
Reason and Government, like two broad seas,
Yearn for each other with outstretched arms
Across this narrow isthmus of the throne,
And roll their white surf higher every day.
One age moves onward, and the next builds up
Cities and gorgeous palaces, where stood
The rude log huts of those who tamed the wild,
Rearing from out the forests they had felled
The goodly framework of a fairer state;
The builder's trowel and the settler's axe
Are seldom wielded by the self-same hand;
Ours is the harder task, yet not the less
Shall we receive the blessing for our toil
From the choice spirits of the after-time.
The field lies wide before us, where to reap
The easy harvest of a deathless name,
Though with no better sickles than our swords.
My soul is not a palace of the past,
Where outworn creeds, like Rome's gray senate, quake,
Hearing afar the Vandal's trumpet hoarse,
That shakes old systems with a thunder-fit.
The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change;
Then let it come: I have no dread of what
Is called for by the instinct of mankind;
Nor think I that God's world will fall apart
Because we tear a parchment more or less.
Truth is eternal, but her effluence,
With endless change, is fitted to the hour;
Her mirror is turned forward, to reflect
The promise of the future, not the past.
He who would win the name of truly great,
Must understand his own age and the next,
And make the present ready to fulfil
Its prophecy, and with the future merge
Gently and peacefully, as wave with wave.
The future works out great men's destinies;
The present is enough for common souls,
Who, never looking forward, are indeed.
Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age
Are petrified forever: better those
Who lead the blind old giant by the hand
From out the pathless desert where he gropes,
And set him onward in his darksome way.
I do not fear to follow out the truth,
Albeit along the precipice's edge.
Let us speak plain: there is more force in names
Than most men dream of; and a lie may keep
Its throne a whole age longer if it skulk
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