Chapter II

O heart and brain, who see the father load
His train with food, not for the few, but all,
And hear train-whistlings in March winds, jay call
And ground-hog sniffs! Haste out, for from the road
That leads to every Industry's abode,
The trust that, bat-eyed, comes out at night-fall,
Now moves the tracks inside his private wall,
Claiming all trains from God a debt long owed.

O heart and brain, it rest with you, how long
The legislative wreckers shall prevail.
Ye have the power to balk them. Why then, fail?
Regain your legislatures. Man them strong
And drive thence all sleek hounds, trust-trained to trail
Safe outlaws' paths to fastnesses of wrong.

THE PRESS

Was ever such unblushing harlotry,
Such sale of virtue in the Market place,
As by the Press? The red paint on her face
Is Degradation's mark. Alas, that she,
Born to bring forth the truth, still, is so base,
She kills her child and, then, to hide all trace,
Cracks bone by bone to dust, too fine to see.

O Press, poor harlot of the tyrant, Gold,
What freedom, but from truth, hast thou to boast?
Hark, who now speaks is murdered Truth's pale ghost:
"Conceiving life--oh, bring it forth! aye, hold
Thy child on high with love, as priest, the Host!
Crush not its bones, with smile and eyes set cold."

THE TRUTH

What is the truth? The focus of all rays
Passing through Nature and the soul and mind.
It is the Sun of Suns, around which wind
The Heavens and all the worlds. Such is its blaze,
That had it not, at intervals, a haze,
Grading both Angel and the Human-kind,
The bright Arch-angel would be stricken blind,
To grope in Heaven, a Homer, sighing lays.

What less could fitly crown Omnipotence
Than Truth, the focus of all rays in Good?
Lo! there it shines upon the Holy Rood,
Breaking through clouds, a-massing dark and dense
From countless ages, Cains to Brotherhood--
With rays of pardon for the World's offense.

OUR LORD'S LAST PRAYER

"Forgive them, Sire! They know not what they do."--
Ah, Christ! how at that face to face God-plea,
The Demon and his legions, mocking thee
With every generation, brought to view,
Flashed with dismay, and, boltless lightening through
The ages, thunder down Eternity,
'Till faint as the sound in shells, far from the sea;
For that thy prayer would be vouchsafed, they knew.

All grandeurs, gathered as a dazzling crown
For thee, in barter for thy knee's least bend,
The Demon dashed to fragments to Time's end.
There, born anew in spirit, we look down
And, in the ocean of thy prayer, Amen'd,
See but earth's monsters, with the demons drown.

THOUGHT IS TRUTH'S ECHO

Thought is truth's echo--not her glorious eyes
Beholding God, nor her white arms of light,
Lifted in worship. Following truth, our flight
At highest range is where our echo dies.
Oh all your power and beauty, earth and skys!
And, Soul and Mind! your Beauty and your Might--
Truth gathers in one flash and, catching sight
Of God, lifts high in love's full sacrifice.

Twixt Truth and Thought, what Truth is oft is space
Wherein, with intuition for her wing,
The soul mounts. It is there I hear her sing:
"Lo, Truth, so swift aloft, Thought dies in chase,
Turns earthward, and the gifts her white arms bring,
Are outshone by God's glory in her face!"

HEAVEN

Ah, what is Heaven? Such Glory that Sun-light
Seems darkness, and Mass Music, shell-shut sound.
What we call senses here, there so abound,
The soul appears a broadening heaven in flight,
Feathered and downed with all the stars, whose white
Is all hues mingled. Oh, the awe profound!
For every moment there, new Heavens astound
The myriad senses, with God's Love and Might.

If "Holy, Holy, Holy, Evermore?"
Be the one chant of angel and of Saint
Before the Throne, it is their gaspings faint
Between their transports to high Heavens from lower;
For, what is love's eternal Firmament
But Heaven on Heaven, that we may ceaseless soar?

HUMILITY

Was not humility the Earthward stair
From highest Heaven, by which God came to men,
To show the way aloft to human ken?
Ah, by what other pass, are men to fare
Through mist and cloud, except the path, aflare
With his blest steps from Heaven, and up again?
Steps, not from star to star, but fen to fen,
That all might follow and not one despair!

Oh, steps of Love! Could we reach with our eyes
Their fulgence, we would shrink back with dismay;
For, though 'tis through the world's contempt move they--
Hark! How the hidden choirs of countless skies
Chant at all heights: "Lo, God comes by this way,
And makes world-wide, His stair to Paradise!"

THE NIGHT OF MYSTERIES

A cataract of stars, which, with each fall
Broadens and brightens, rapturing the sight
Of angel hosts, that view it from the height
Of knowledge of God's love for one and all
His creatures--and not darkness to appal
The spirit by the quench of every light,
For which God grants it vision--is the night
Of Life's strange mysteries, both great and small.

Oh cataracts, beyond the angels' count,
Pause and shine pendant over every deep
Of heart, mind, spirit! Lo! how down they sweep
To basic Good where, massing, they remount,
Till, mid God's "Many Mansions," high they leap,
Forming forever, joy's most splendent fount!

WHAT THE POETS SHOW

When, at God's fiat, Light flashed forth, the beam
Evolved a million pigments, as it sped
To every nature. Now, of all its spread,
What shaft so glorious as the poet's dream
Which, mote and mass, reflects the Will Supreme
That life is progress, and by flight, or tread,
It circles God-ward up, till perfected!
For, harboring meaner thought were to blaspheme.

What, if the world be chaos where it sins,
Race feuds, Creed hatreds, falsehoods gross, deceit,
Intrigue and greed, form swirling, blinding sleet?
Honor and Truth, though buried to their chins,
Look up and smile; for, though the storms still beat,
The poets show 'tis Spring, not Winter, wins.

THE SOUL'S ASCENSION

Not mine the night that creeps beneath Life's sea,
Or lurks within Hope's ruins, sunk below
The desert, or the stagnant pool--oh, no!
But night that mounts the heavens, till it is free
Where stars, prefiguring all things that be
Obscure on earth, catch sight of God and glow,
And golden shadows large and larger grow,
Cast by Gift-bearers to Humanity.

Oh, once the cold of all the unsunn'd space
Was in my reptile life of soul, wing-bound;
But now, soul-free, what warmth from stars all round!
'Tis not by strength of mine, Lord, but thy grace,
My soul soars from the depths of sea, or ground,
Till, at star-heights, it meets Thee, face to face!

LYRIC TRANSPORT

What but the spirit's ladder to God's throne
Is beauty? Oh, from rung to rung to climb,
Till faint becomes the azure's anthem chime
Of planets, multitudinous, or lone,
And Inspiration, drunk with fragrance, blown
From God's rare, inmost garden, wall'd from Time,
Sets free the Sonnet with is wings of rhyme
To carry down the transport, upward known!

Mine is no swaying ladder, like the sea's,
Whose rounds of rollers, raised above Sun-rise,
Lean not on Heaven, hence shattered lie at noon;
For 'tis set firmly on the verities,
Which form God's throne. Ah, there, what joy, my prize!
Would that I had a dove for every boon!

THE SUNRISE

The Sun is God's great joy to Human sight.
Oh, up and off in chariots, Sea! and ride,
All generations, up, till mountain-eyed,
To welcome earth-ward, God's Supreme delight.
Imagination swirls in swallow flight,
Giddy with Beauty, deepening--Oh, how glide
From star to star, to the haloes, season-dyed
And countless! Its wings shrivel up like night.

Oh, yea, the Sun in one subliming rise
From Wisdom's infinite mind! This Reason knows.
It has no set. There, Sense, with weals or woes
For beads, or fingers, count our shuts of eyes,
Excluding Knowledge. What! God's joy to close
And all its goodness break and drift cloud-wise?

TWO DARKNESSES

There are two darknesses; one where the Lord
Hides beauty--that by which men know His face.
All, in that darkness, feel His fingers trace
Their features gently, and their hearts record
The feeling, as of one, whose eyes, restored,
Would see, but for the Father's close embrace.
The other is the outer dark--a place
Where hate turns black the light upon it poured.

O God! the only darkness that I dread,
Is where Thou art not--that where Hate's black fire
Surmounts the heavens, to burst with thunder dire
And, in its fall forever, drag the dead
Of heart and spirit--those whom Thy desire
Would fain have made the halo round Thy head.

THE DOOM OF HATE

A spirit passed the Sun, the Moon and Star,
And dwelled and dreamed in darkness all its own.
The music of the spheres, though thither blown,
As faint as fragrance from a flower afar,
Disturbed this spirit's ear, attuned to jar
Of orb with orb; for hate of light, truth known,
Fashions hot worlds which, cooled to clay and stone,
Clash, rising toward calm Heaven, which they would mar.

Ah, if where love was not, he smiled elate,
His smile at God returned, a lightening flash
That shattered him. He saw his planets clash,
Burst and, then, by the downward law of hate,
Sink and leave not a single spark, nor ash,
For the new firmament he would create.

THE EVIL IN THE WORLD

There are two Gods--one, Good, the other, Ill.
They clash in Nature--so the Persian taught,
And long a sect in Europe spread the thought.
Why there is evil is a problem still
To many, who see not in Human Will,
A being that with beauty could have caught
Up to his Maker, had he gladly wrought
With light and warmth, instead of dark and chill.

God said, "Let there be Light," and light was made.
God made not darkness--that is light's exclusion,
Forming a region where, in wild confusion,
Men, Nations, each a ferret, blood-eyed shade,
Worry each other, till, with disillusion
For lamp, comes conscience, crying, "God Betrayed!"

THE EARTH RENEWED BY MEMORY

Ah, in the angel-fall from Heaven, is hope?
The wing-whir discord of the legion's fall
From God forever, mocks my heart's loud call.
Empty of beauty from its base to cope,
The Earth is hollow. Where, then, can I grope
And not be met by echoes that appal?
What! shouts my mind, in wonder that I crawl
And, having skyey wings, in hollows mope.

Does scent from bloom, or warble from the wood,
Not atmosphere the un-aerial void
Twixt thee and beauty, which thy youth enjoyed?
Fly back to earth, by memory renewed;
She fills the hollow, echoing hosts destroyed,--
With Spring, reflecting Heaven's Triumphant Good.

IN THE DIMPLE OF BEAUTY'S CHEEK

O beauty! in the dimple of thy cheek,
My love could live forever and be blest.
There, with the sun, a rose-bud on thy breast,
How thou rejoicest, hastening to speak
To thy fond Father! Oh, how vain to seek
A sweeter refuge for the Spirit's rest,
Than mid thy blushes, when thou marvelest
At His great love, for, oh! thy heart is meek.

Oh beauty! in thy Father's arms, thou art.
Enclose me in thy dimple; for, though this
Were but a bud, or molded seed, what bliss
To watch bloom gather scent, or new life start,
And hear our Father, bending for a kiss,
Whisper to thee, the secrets of His heart!

THE CAMP FIRE

Beauty is love and, hence is heightening fire,
Consuming Nature. All the dark can bring
To quench it, feeds it. Look! how everything
Is caught in the blaze, which mounts up high and higher!
Oh! truly, 'tis a vision to inspire
The soul with transport, more than joy can sing;
For, if not for the blaze, what cold would sting
Poor mortals, who crowd round it, nigh and nigher!

Is beauty not the camp-fire, which one host
Leaves burning for another, close behind?
Yea, yea, the Powers Divine, O Human Kind!
Have left their camp-fire burning on the coast,
Where they embarked from glimpse of Human mind,
To give you warmth and light to hold your post.

MOTHER

All beings, legioning celestial light,
Moved in procession toward a vacant throne.
Their chant was faith and hope, as, now, our own.
At last, it came to pass, their faith grew sight.
They saw One Star in night's down-fall, stay white
And, by the Holy Spirit brighter blown,
Ascend in Heaven, till there, as high and lone,
As over Nature's marveling zenith height.

Reaching the throne, its queen, this star became.
Awed by the Triune's Honor as her crown,
The legions, circling, soared with eyes cast down;
But, when their wonder heard the strange, new name
In Heaven, from Christ's lips, "Mother," how they shone,
Reflecting Christ's child-eyes, with love aflame!

IN HEAVEN NO HEART STILL HEAVES

Lo! God lets drop blue doves which ground the mind
Like clover; then, with drawing to the skies,
His pleasure is to watch the flocks arise.
Here, there, they mount; they show no cloud, no wind,
Can hinder homing; and the angels find
No transport, like the sight, for, to their eyes,
'Tis more souls for the joy, which glorifies
The Father, traced to love by pigeon-kind.

Oh, to his love, how great our spirit's worth!
Each is as all. In heaven, no heart still heaves.
The sun sinks with its last of lingering eves,
And, then, if dearest doves of azure birth,
Wife, parent, child, be missed, off mercy leaves
With stars for eyes, to search the darks of earth.

ST. PETER'S CATHEDRAL IN ROME

This temple is soul-startling. 'Tis to me
A thunder storm in stone, with Sinai flare
Across the Ages. 'Tis the Fiend's despair
And the Arch-angel's Triumph. It sets free
The mind and soul with certitude, Christ's key
Which, like the Sun, opes Heaven--the Good and Fair.
Still, oft, what darkness drowns the sun's noon glare
Within the Temple! 'Tis from Calvary.

Oh, 'tis from Calvary's grief. 'Tis Christ's emotion,
On from the Cross, that from His glory known,
The German should have fled and, frantic, thrown
Away his soul to Strauss or Kant's vague notion,
Unhumaning, till, in the Kaiser, grown
A Nietzsche whirl-wind in a crimson ocean.

MY BUGLER BOY

With heart pain and with quiver of the lip,
I bid my boy "good bye," with words of cheer.
I hug him to my heart to hide a tear,
And hold him close so long, that no tongue-slip
Could more betray my bodings for his ship,
Or troop, when landed. It is when I hear
My daughters' voices, that I shame off fear
And take my boy's both hands with firmest grip.

Go, son, and, though with thy young life 'tis blown,
Blare thou the Bugle, rousing man to sweep
The monsters back to Hell's profoundest deep,
Where, mocking Spring and Sun-rise, they have grown
On longings for the sea, the world must weep
When, from its heart, the hope of Peace has flown.

KAISER, BEWARE

Dost thou, mad Kaiser, for historic name,
Set fire to Europe? Is it joy to gaze
At blacker smoke than Etna's, and a blaze
That wakes up Chaos, wild to come and claim
The World, since Light, God-bidden though it came,
Has failed to dawn upon our human ways?
O Twin of Chaos! peer thou through the haze!
'Tis Human Beings feed the crackling flame.

Beware, the smoke, like Etna's, is the curse
Of widows on thy people-dooming throne,
And in no country, more than in thine own,
Cry out all mothers: "Wherefore bear and nurse?
To feed war with our sons, our flesh and bone,
That chaos may reclaim the Universe?"

WOMAN, IN GERMANY

The German mother has too long been what
A Chancellor once called the "Kingdom's Cow."
Ah, as she bears the droves for slaughter, how
Her dumb-beast eyes crave pity for her lot!
See, there she smiles, like loving God forgot--
All His supernal patience on her brow.
How long must her grand arch of brain, as now,
Bear up a universe "of what should not"?

There, lies she, crushed by troops in hot pursuit
Of mocking shadows; for be Gain complete,
What is it but twin brother to defeat?
Stand up the dead on any bloody route.
Stoop for no kiss from orphans, at thy feet,
O Triumph! for ash-cord is all thy fruit.

O THOU PALE MOON

O fair, full moon! I look close at thy face.
Thou must be happy, being in the skys;
And, yet, thy flush grows pallor to mine eyes.
Thou art as one, who breathless after chase,
Would rest, but dreads to check her onward pace.
O fugitive from where no fledgling flies,
No bee finds bud, and where red billows rise,
Engulfing down dark years, the Human Race!

O thou pale moon, who hast companioned Man
Through every darkness since the night's first fall!
Hast thou, along thy foot-worn, azure wall,
Ever seen seas so hard for hope to span,
As this red surge, that in a spring so small,
A bird could beak it up, its flood began?

THE TIGER

How glares the tiger in his desert lair--
Now half the world! Beholding with dismay
That Human Freedom is the tiger's prey,
A giant, down whose shoulders, broad and bare,
The long, thick, crimson flow is Sampson's hair,
Makes haste to clutch the beast.
Oh, how the clay beneath their struggle, reddens, night and day,
Till lies the beast, a shapeless carcass there!

Oh! never from the long, thick crimson flow
A down thy shoulders from thy noble brow,
America, came such God's-strength as now,
Comes to thine arm against the world's grim foe--
The beast that, sighting man, devours him, how
The world may end, a wilderness of woe.

TO OUR BOYS "OVER THERE"

Where flies our flag is Freedom's holy ground;
There, it unfurls all benisons to Man.
The twin of Spring, its spread unfolds God's plan
Of human happiness, by setting bound
To greed, lust, powers,--all colds,--that Right be crowned.
Lo! where it leads, ye youth form valor's van,
Mirrored and echoed by the azure's span
For ages, for Man's gain in yours is wound.

Oh, justice's Hot Gulf Stream are ye, who open
The sea, which fiendish craft has frozen hard!
Oh, may your warmth for righteousness transform
The tyrant's artic region, with no hope in,
To Freedom's Temperate Zone, which they, who guard
The planets, save from wreck by quake or storm.

THE PROFITEERS

Now and in life--not Virgil--breaks a storm
Of Harpies, harsh to ear and foul to smell.
It sweeps War's lengthening coast, where each sea-swell
Is Humans, gasping. Hope drags each cold form
From hearth to hearth, to find no ember warm;
Then, their eyes glitter frost, who hear hope yell
As up she climbs the rocks and falls pell-mell
Back from small herbs, where monsters swoop and swarm.

Oh, could the bestial birds, in Virgil's verse,
See Hope's hands redden, as she rends her hair,
They would grow human--would not glut, but share;
Nor, then, shed human semblance for man's curse--
As ye do, who from want, hold warmth and fair,
And gorge your bulks to sleep, as want writhes worse!

WHY THE STARS LAUGH

Hark! 'tis the laughter of the stars at Earth,
And Nature's, too, with every pitch of voice.
Earth's carnival of sheer grotesque and noise,
Where, gagged and manacled, walk Peace and Mirth,
Shows Britain now, a beast of broadening girth,
Set out to crush World Freedom. He destroys,
And thinks his bear-like rearing, planet poise
That is to influence the world's new birth.

The stars are kind, as all the ages know;
The sense of humor twinkles in their eyes,
At Earth's strange follies; but this beast would try
To thrust aside the planets, and make woe,
The fortune of World Freedom! That is why
The stars laugh, and all nature jeers the show.

PRAYER FOR WORLD PEACE

Lord, not Thy work, the World's calamities,
But Man's. If Human Will revolt from Thine,
It flees Thy region, where the stars all shine
With longing to let down the Azure's Peace--
To dash its hosts from summits into seas,
Where Empires are the breakers. There the brine
Is anguish, and there Triumph leaves no sign,
Save wreck on rock, and Plague, adrift on breeze.

When Nations turn from Light, in thought, or life,
Their speed is brink-ward, save Thy Mercy stay;
For all is precipice, except Thy way.
Help, Lord, for here is heightening surge of strife;
Here, clouds turn floods, coasts are wind-whirled, like spray,
And lightenings, hurling back thy light, are rife.

RELIGION

Religion is Ascension. 'Tis the flights
Of souls to summits of the true and wise.
One, witnessing the generations rise,
Sees them a shine at countless, different heights,
Where they, responding to their inner lights,
Glow, like the clouds at morn, with graded dyes.
If summits, there are depths; if virtue, vice;
Hence, 'tis life's rise from falls, that judgment sights.

Witnessed, or not, there is no age, nor climb,
But souls arise as bloom, where earth is treed;
As warm, red rays, where cold from mountaining need;
As burst and spread of planets, where dark crime;
Nay, rise to poise above the star's top speed
To God, like larks, in praise for life and time.

THE GOLDEN JUBILEE OF SISTERS OF CHARITY

I

How thy Half Century shines over head!
'Tis an unfading rain-bow, one whose dyes
Are richer and more numerous to the eyes
Of Angels, than to ours. Its rays, if spread
Above a flood of sin and world of dead,
Give to the drowned, new life, new earth, new skies.
Night counts her stars, but falters, when souls rise
Bright with the Grace which God's annointed shed.

Belov'd Irene, how great our joy to see
Thine arch, aglow with virtue's every hue!
Oh, how much more must they rejoice, who view
From inner Heaven, the arch that is for thee,
Triumphal! for than vows like thine, lived true,
No grander arch from earth to heaven could be.