Chapter II: Part 2

The seasons pass, till on their hands they count
Four palms, and to the third, a score and three
In life's meridian how the circles mount
That measure our existence, if there be
No canker worm that clogs the ready wheel;
If care hangs not upon the skirts of time;
And if, like most mankind, we only feel
Its gentle passing, by the hills we climb
In ambling, easy way, and retrospect
Surprises into thought, and we wake up
To feel how swift we journey. We reflect
After reflection barrens of its fruit, the cup
Which we have mixed we drink; if it be gall
We gulp it down the same; we cannot change
The current of our lives, and useless is the call
On any but the hand of God. 'Tis strange
The miracle of life should ever pass
And print no letters deep into the soul!
The years go by, and, but the tuft of grass
More reverent than we, tells o'er our dust its rosary,
in deep green scroll.

MIZRAIM AND LUD.

Near the rim of Karoun, where the pyramids drink the dew that
should dampen the soil;
And the Nilus pours over its green level banks, its annual
freightage of spoil;
Where the date ripens dark to the child of the sun, and the
pomegranate colors for fruit;
The ibis is sounding the damps of the land, and earth in its
plethory mute.

The fat of the fields husks the voice of the morn, while
Demeter is weighing her sheaves;
The lotus has honied its lips for the kiss, "and the turtle
in mockery grieves."
What is that, where the Orient gathers her gold, and the eye
wanders back to the sea?
What cloud on the horizon's breach can be seen? What wakens
the vulture's rude glee?

'Tis the shock of the battle that burdens the air, and the
armies that burden the eye;
They have met (could Elysian give landscape more fair?), have
met to embrace and to die.
The Prophet still lives, and has led to the sun all Egypt; and
gathered as one
The people to hallow the harvest-moon feast, ere the work of
the year is done.

But Mizraim outnumbers the children of Lud, and the shepherd kings,
crafty and weak,
Have laid tasks on their shoulders too heavy to bear, till the
voice of their burden must speak.
In vain the gray Prophet lifts up to his god his winglet of
prayer for peace;
The tempest of war has broke over the plain, and his altars can
bring no surcease.

The black and the bronze, the iron and brass; how they struggle
and grip for the field!
The spear and the arrow, the halbert and lance, and who shall be
first to yield?
Not the iron; it is strong and resistless in weight. Not the brass;
it is beaten and firm.
What a hecate of agony burdens the plain! what a banquet for vulture
and worm!
But the iron is too heavy, the brass is too thin, and under the
weight it gives way,
As a wall, that is breached and toppled by time; and Mizraim gains
the day.

Oppression, when reversed, is double weight;
The Slave pours lead into the lash he bore;
And, as the Master adds recruited hate
To blows, that he has learned to feel before,
The soul its letters of forgiveness learns
From only one great Master, in all time;
Revenge is human, and forever burns
Upon the trackway of retreating crime.
The text and testwork of their lives was lost;
And when the King was slain, and they o'erthrown,
His people paid their tyranny with cost.

Only the Prophet, with his magic stone,
Could purchase their withdrawal; they must leave
(They were the early jewels of the sun)
And Uri pledged their fortunes to retrieve,
If they would journey, where the day begun,
And seek the closer presence of their god,
In paths where human feet had never trod.
They must divide with Egypt; but go out
Well laden for the journey; should they dare
To turn, the heavy hand of Mizraim would not spare.

AEgyptus! thou above thy gates hath writ
So many times the monosylbic "when."
We, weary of conjecture; round us flit
The phantoms of the past; and we again
Pass in review thy pages, black with mold;
Intemporate within a crumbling earth,
Against the char of empires thou dost hold
The charms that emulate immortal birth.
We write mutation on the brow of Time;
Thou art the changeless one of all the world--
Thou hast no brotherhood in any clime;
All mortal barbets have in vain been hurled.

"Time conquers all things?" Thou giv'st back the lie;
Above its ruins, thou dost stand, serene--
Eternity!--Must thou, perforce, then die?
What tragedy hast thou, indeed, not seen?
Must thou, too, look on death? thou wilt not dim;
But in impassive slumber, thou wilt fall
As sinks the sun, beneath the horizon's rim,
And answer only the Archangel's call.
We leave thee loathely, for our souls are wed
To thy enchanted gardenhood of lore.
"The morning stars sang joy" above thy bed,
The nations, in their cerements, shall pass thy door,
And earth be wrapped in ashes ere thy brow shall bear the fatal
legend, "Nevermore."

THE MOURNING SHEPHERDS

The tambour' is silent, O god of the Nile!
The harp has been hung in acacian shade.
We are bowed to the earth, we are broken and bent,
And the blade of our fathers in dust has been laid.

We came, as the simoom creeps over the plain;
We came, as the tiger its covert forsakes;
As the hurricane brushes the dust from the brakes;
As the lightning leaps out and the thunder-god shakes.

We are shorn of our strength as with plague we are smote;
The axe has been wrenched from the hands that are brawn,
And the arms whose strong sinews till now were unbent
Have been broken as brittles; our prowess is gone.

O! thou bright shining god! with thy scintles of gold;
If thy children have gathered the glow of thy face,
If thy kisses, ere warmed to the lips that are cold,
O we pray! let us feel thy impassioned embrace.

We are journeying forth to the cradle of morn,
Where thy lids feel the weight of their slumbering still;
We would kneel at thy bed where the seasons are born,
And learn from thy lips the whole law of thy will.

Have we sinned in thy sight? have we slackened our pace?
Are we paying the forfeit in wormwood of shame?
We draw nearer to thee, and our lives we would place
In the hands of the Maker, that out of thy flame

We may gather that fire that shall glow with thy love;
And will never grow dim through the future of years,
That shall make us like thee, and our fealty prove
'Till we learn to forget this dark trackhood of tears.

As we turn to the East, wilt thou smile on our way?
Wilt thou lessen the distance between us and thee?
Or our hearts remain hungry, the shadow still stay
With its wizard arm lifted to smite as we flee.

We doubt thee no longer--we know thou wilt aid;
We turn to the path where thy morning rays shine;
We will seek thy first footfall, and all unafraid,
We feel thee, we love thee, we know we are thine.

We leave the old life, with the graves of our kin,
We turn from the sunset of dampness and death,
We turn where the light with its god doth begin,
And the praise of the day-king embalms every breath;

Where the sun slakes his thirst with the dew of the flowers,
Where the night flees before him far into the west,
Where the honey-dew clings to the fruit-laden hours,
Where the soul sets its table, with Joy as its guest.

So does our faith stand out against our grief;
So does our hope grow up into belief.
One God? Yes, Father, Thou! and only One.
We praise thee; yet, our praise is only done,
When we extol thee for the gift of faith.
Not every one can name thee; but each breath
May be enladen with the thought of praise
And all adore thy attributes--the ways
That they adore thee are not always thine;
Yet, do they bend to thy great thoroughfare and shine
With light from the Eternal throne; 'tis well,
Nor otherwise than good--it can but swell
The choral of thy praise; and in the end
These thousand thoughts of Deity, in thee, not fail to blend.

THE JOURNEY.

O thou! who charmed the demons in the breast
Of Saul, and set the universal voice
Of all the earth to thy unflagging song;
Thou royal shepherd! bend for us across
The bridge of ages thy leant lips, and pour
The echo of thy music on our souls.

And Thou of Nazareth! whose very life
Was as the cadence of a well-strung harp,
Thyself the instrument, upon whose strings,
Ten thousand symphonies are left entranced;
Pour in the empty vial of our verse,
Some of thy soul of music, and let shine
Through every darkened crevice of the heart,
Rays of celestial sunshine. Not in vain
Our humble dalliance, if thou set the charm
Of thine approval. Let our song be praise
And devotate our hands, that there be left
No tissue, but is animate of Thee!

The seas reach out to clasp each other's hands,
The greater and the less, and leap the sands
That tear in two their waters; but not so
She of the Nile; her rights will not forego.
The hand that rocks the crib of empire holds
A charm, that locks the East and West in one
The track of nations is her beaten path,
And undisputed, till the earth be done.
Man may disturb it, but the hand of God
Has placed a thousand tokens on this sod.

The flocks are gathered, and the flight began,
Old Uri and attendants in the van;
The portents were of good as far as seen,
Each breast a shrine of hope; thus early man
Gave little time to sorrow--after years
Were left for its fruition; light of heart,
These early-planted germlets of the earth,
Took their reverses in the better part
Of hardihood; they had thus early learned,
That in the chafe of fortune there is gain;
That scars are coronets, though they be burned
Deep in the brow of care; each gem a pain.
Our philosophic age with heavy draught,
Drinks deep in phantasies, but fails to learn
The wiser lesson of this early craft,
To catch the wheel of fortune with each turn.

East over Syria they bent their steps,
Meeting Euphrates many leagues above
Where Babylon since molded into form
Her mystical proportions; and so strove
Persistently the mastery of earth.
Crossing the Tigris but a span below,
Where Taurus from his fountains feeds the stream,
They traverse Persia with its after-glow
Of conquest; where Ispahan gave touch,
To chords that deify the voice of song,
And mellow through the ages, if so much
As but an echo would inspire the tongue,
With that enchantment, that rolls down the course
Of her great history. We seek in vain
Another Cyrus, or another force
Of Scripture fulfillment, with lesser pain,
And Time's repleted garner has no riper grain.

Still East they cross the Amoo, and above
Where now, Bokhara's languor and repose
Invites the Sclavic hordes in summer quest
Of forage. And Belor, giant like, still throws
Its shadow o'er the landscape; and the Koosh
Shortens the noon of summer, from the South;
A thousand sparkling torrents downward rush,
And pour their waste of waters in the mouth
Of Indus. They cross where Belor melts its snow,
To placid Cashgar's arms, sending below
A current to the waste of farther Nor.
They stand on Cobis' southern girt, and drink
The final retrospective of the West;
And keep the gloomy borders to the brink
Of far-off Koulon, where the Argoon lends
Its mite of wastage to the vast Amour;
And the impetuous Shilka, swiftly sends
Its tribute to the master of Mantchoor.

One winter they had spent upon the way,
Within the vale of Cashgar, where the flocks
Found generous herbage; but they could not stay
Longer than opening spring, when from the rocks
And passes of the Koosh, a savage tribe
Came fiercely on them; and again the fire
From Uri's sacred pebble, as a bribe
Saved them from ruin, and the warlike ire
Of Lama's devotees, for even then
On upper Ind, his worship had begun;
But superstition, ranks us all as men,
And mystery doth mold us into one.
The Argoon and the Shilka passed; they keep
Their steady march, down Armour's limpid tide.
Yet summer wastes to autumn. Seasons creep
So noiselessly, that our souls are open wide,
If we set watch upon them; unaware
They find us napping, in our wakeful age;
And how much more, in the unrisen sun
Of ancient man! We wonder that the page
Is not more blurred and blotted in the years
That are far gone, when knowledge only bubbled up through
tears.

A Winter on the Amour near the sea;
The Frost King strokes his heavy beard in glee,
In surfeit of his triumph, o'er the foe
That dares invade his borders; and the snow
Scatters its fleecy fullness o'er the land,
Hiding the face of Nature with its hand
So cold and clasping. O 'tis very hard!
To see familiar faces pass the ward
Of our immediate contact, and the earth
Draw back into its arms, with tightening girth
Our loved ones. But 'tis a heavier lot
To see our mother Earth, whose faithful breast
Has never failed to aid; so chilled in death
That it cannot respond, though it be rest,
Recuperent and needful; still the same
When we are starving for its warm caress,
And cannot spare its nursing, when our claim
Is mortal, and we feel the strong hand press
Our vitals; and we labor for our breath;
And Famine lends its wizard hand, to fill the tooth of death.

Old Uri vainly calls the shining god;
Though it may light his altar, still the flame
Is but a weakling; and the weary host
Were wrangling at his impotence, and tame
His efforts to assuage them. He had taught
His followers of a near approach; the sun
Seemed coy of his endeavors, for the thought
Of zone or solstice, had not then begun,
And Winter was their time of penance, when
Their god rode low, and frowned him out of sight.
They offered for his anger many gifts,
And set their watchmen to outwake the night.
In question of his rising. Why should he
Keep so much closer the horizon's rim
When they were in his quest, and sought the verge
Of farthest empire, in their reach of him?
O empty arms! and ever reaching out,
Fold in the blessings that your hands enclose.
There is nor reason, nor excuse for doubt,
The river of God's love so near you flows.
Your very feet are on the water's brink,
His very arms are all around you thrown,
You touch him in your timidness, and shrink
To his embraces; no human soul was ever yet alone.

They settle down to Winter, and their flocks
Must furnish sustenance, until the sun
Shall break their penance, and embrown the locks
Of the o'ergristled seasons; and this won,
They counsel further movement. Uri speaks:
"Sons of the Summer God, I little thought
When we set out from Egypt, that our feet
Would be thus bruised and bled; but it is well.
We learn the lesson of our latent sin;
This trial of our faith will make us whole,
If we but draw the diamond out of it.
We have not vainly trod the heavy press
Of our affliction, if we firmly breast
The waters. I have kept faithful watch--
We are but self-styled lords, and forfeit much
Of our asserted masterhood; the birds
Make many less mistakes--we used to note
The flight of waterfowl in Egypt. Why
Should we not learn their wisdom in this clime?
Before the sun sank low, and Winter came
(Led by a providence that makes all things
To minister our wants), I watched the birds,
And many, turned to East, across the sea.
We lose our way sometimes, they never do;
They are much closer children to the sun
Than we, by their dependence--we need help
As much as any feathered wingster does--
And yet we push it back, when we might reach
And find a steady hand. Let us go to
And make us ships; that when the Spring
Shall beckon back to life the dormant earth,
And all the birds turn back in countermarch,
We fly against their flight, and reach the clime
From whence the sun has warned them to return
To this cold country of the nether earth.

"Behold! these rugged trees stand stout for us,
And ready for our architrave; and we
Were better wont to labor than to dole
Our time in murmurs at our fate. Up! up!
And do! and though we suffer overmuch,
Our labor shall not vainly mock at us.
Even old Kohen saw a journey South,
When he did burn our eyes, as he went up,
And he saw fat and plenty in the land
Where his prophetic eye did cast our lot;
And we will not mistrust what leads to light,
Though it be lifted in a demon's hand."

The forests gave to them their virgin palms,
And they did rudely shape them into crafts;
Made ready for the flood, when the warm sun
Should waken nature with enlivening draughts;
But Spring wore into Summer, ere the birds
Gave the unspoken pledge of their return.
The sun, still coy, refused to climb as high
As it had done in Egypt; still they burn
With new-born hope, as they float down to sea,
And, moving counter to their winged friends,
Cross to Lopatka, where they only wait
Replenishment, which nature always sends,
Where faith is instinct as in lower life,
(The birds teach providence, without a chance,)
And so they wander on, to the Aleutes;
Passing and calling, as they still advance,
They reach to where Alaska strikes the sea,
In severance to meet them. They kept on,
Feeding on eggs of seabirds, and the meats
That everywhere supplied them. They have gone
So far on Nature's very track, and now
A narrow river beckons their research,
And they pass upward, till a mountain range
Confronts their passage, like a royal perch
From which the gods might frown their hardihood,
For this intrusion of another world.
But they have battled with the plague and flood;
And though Olympus all his thunders hurled,
They had not turned; they saw the earnest need
Of pushing forward ere the sun turned back,
And so they crossed to where the eastern slope,
Feeds the McKenzie. Here an easy track
Leads down and cuts the stronger range in two,
A little while among its shadows grope,
When the broad prospect opened to their view.
They follow the receding sun in hope,
Still bearing to the east their steady trend,
Hoping to win their God to close embrace;
And morn and eve around their altars bend
In thankfulness, that they still see his face.
Through many valleys, virgin to their sight,
And many lakes, whose bosoms never stirred
To man, the weak pretender of God's might;
But nature spreads her happy hearth with beast and flower
and bird.

PART SECOND.

AZTLAN.

THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

Father of Waters! Nilus of the West!
Thou holdst thy secrets from the sons of men;
A knowledge of the past which none would wrest
Or wish to circumscribe with tongue or pen
To the weak bonds of history; but rather stand
With old De Soto on thy banks, and reverence the hand
That drew the fetters from thy limbs, and set thee first at birth,
On thy unmuzzled pilgrimage, without a peer on earth.

Better thy unbroke seal, if it would teach
The ponderous worm of destiny, called man;
How great things may be hidden from his reach,
And mighty things be silent, that his span
Is but a hand-breadth to the great unknown,
A thistle-down, before the breezes blown,
That silent and unseen God turns the mighty mill,
And on the brow of giant force he writes his words, "Be still."

The possibles of time, are all thine own.
Thou hast not reared thy monuments of stone
To overtop the pyramids, yet wrought
In shapely mounds, thy sculpturehood, and caught
From flying Time, the lustre of his wing,
Which gives the semblance of perpetual Spring
To thy vast lap of luxuries; in thee
(Since man first pinioned thee to history)
Is found the acme of a world's desire.
Thy unknown crucial test, has passed the fire
Of many fading centuries; let none inquire
The secrets of thy conquest: be thou shut up with God,
The master molding of his hand--the jewel of his rod!

Yet in the book of Nature there is writ,
Without exception, all her energies,
As line by line, her page becomes enlit;
Yielding to man some new and glad surprise,
As Agassiz, together works with her,
To make the earth, her own interpreter;
And such a giant, must not hope to hide
The unfading Sanscrit, written on its side.

Thy brow wast glistered with the frost of years,
Ere man's first rapture, at the sight of thee;
Yet, were thy banks unswelled, by falling tears
Till he tore back thy splendid tapestry--
The bison and the deer unfrighted came
To lave upon thy borders, all were tame,
In their untoilsome frolics; and the beasts and birds
Made rolic at thy feet, in songs not marred with words.
But sorrow comes with knowledge; 'tis the tree,
That bears the samest fruit in every zone--
The tale of Eden is no mystery,
The tree will verify wherever grown.
And yet, in God's own providence 'tis best,
That Eden be repeated East and West;
If knowledge in the first, brought sorrowhood to earth,
The power to laugh and cry, were purchased at one birth.

They stand upon thy borders: Mighty Stream!
We will not pry thy silent lips apart,
To ask thee when, and how, the Prophet's dream
Reached its fulfillment; treasured in thy heart,
Let it remain as many other things
Are left; our language lessens their effect,
And makes them small in words,--the very springs
Of our existence, are not shown correct,
When crowded into verbage,--so we lay
Our beys upon thee, and we feel 'tis thine;
Thine every secret, of the grand emprise,
With only one unlicensed hand, the Hand of the Divine.

It is enough that after waste and want
And weariness of spirit they have found
A rest upon thy margin, that thy arms
Are opened to enclose them, and the sound
Of human voices mingle with the notes
Of myriad waterfowl. The thousand throats
Of thy unmeasured pasture, blend in praise
To the All Father for the countless ways
That point his providence. The raven's cry
Strikes never vainly, thy omniscient ear,
No effort, but is answered "here am I,"
No prayer but finds the parent very near.

The unconscious hallelujahs of the plain,
The untaught praises of the lofty trees,
The waving upward palms of laden grain,
The mellow notes upon the evening breeze,
The "reveillies" from off the mountain tops,
The nightingale's "tattoo," the many lips
Touched only once by God, the faithful drops
That wear unceasing at the granite mine,
The praise that never sinks to prayer, the finger tips
That span the universal zone of life; all, all incline
To adoration. If we lose our way
(As these poor souls had done) we need but turn
To catch the choral of the passing day.
Behold on every branch and beam the altars burn!
And all things beckon us of God, if we but bend
The enquiring ear, and catch the keynote of the mighty song
That swells from all the universe; we too may blend
In the vast concord, happiest of the throng.

The rhythmal of the angels, is not far
From the first prattle of the infant's tongue
Both caught the glitter of the Eastern star;
The harps were both, by the same Master strung;
The glory of the one, glows from the face;
The other lifts, to meet its parent's kiss.
Not very far, the border land of bliss,
From every infant of the human race.
The sacred fane of childhood, when first reared,
How like a prophecy it should be read--
A thing to be adored, and sometimes feared!
So many unseen hands, smooth down the bed
Of infancy; we can but jostle with our utmost care
Against angelic presences that bend
And print their unseen kisses on the brow,
And with the infant earth, the Heavenly essence blend.

The wheel that never tires, and ever turns,
Crushing the neck of nations in its round,
Before whose tread, the star of empire burns,
Behind whose trend, the ridged and furrowed ground
Gives mute quiescence, to the Master hand;
This wheel rolls on; and now upon thy banks
Great River of the West the infant's cry
Is mingled with the forest din; thy ranks
Are opened to admit the "lullaby"
Of earth's last entity; thou did'st not groan
When buffalo and beaver found thy side,
Nor when thy trees, first echoed to the moan
Of the despondent turtle, to his bride;
And thou did'st smile on this invading race,
And open thy broad prairies, as the palm
Of some great hearted giant, to embrace
The sea-tossed wanderers, the healing balm
Of thy great heaving breast, rubbed almost out
The wrinkles from the faces of these sires
Of early Egypt; they forgot the drought
And mildew of their wanderings, and the fires
Of their thanksgiving altars, gave a zest
They never yet had felt; an empire spread
Around them, in the flush of its full growth
A bride, inviting the espousal bed.

Their ranks had been depleted; yet a few
Still lingered with the Prophet, who had stood
At the first altar; when the fervent sun
First answered their entreaty, and the blood
Was lapped by solar flame; and now, that peace
Enshrines their hearts, and plenty spreads their board,
They warm towards their leader, and return
To their old-fashioned loyalty; his word
Is sacred as the smiling of the sun
Whose burnished mirror likenesses their forms,
And in whose bosom after life is done,
The weary find a shelter from all storms.
Nor do they want a psalmist for his praise,
But he is found with ready harp and voice,
To turn the multitude, with rapturous gaze,
Upon the god of their unshaken choice.
Their morning song is mingled with the mirth,
That rolics from the sycamore and oak,
The song that swells the green and fruent earth,
That needs no trumpet's blare, nor kettle stroke.

THE MORNING SONG OF THE MOUND BUILDERS.

Once more do we turn on thy face our glad eyes,
Great god of the Summer! and sing,
With the lark and the linnet we gladly arise
To welcome the smile of our King.

Our hearts are made glad when we feel thee advance
On thy mission of mercy and might,
For we know that the stroke of thy conquering lance,
Has shattered the bulwarks of night.

We look on thy face, and our doubts are dispelled
By the glance of thy mellowing eye;
For we feel that the rains by our Master are held,
And we fear not to do or to die.

We felt thy embrace, many long weary years,
Yet the scales were not torn from our eyes;
We sought for a father, with prayers and with tears
Till we woke with a welcome surprise.

And beheld from thy face, _all_ the fatherhood shine,
And thy great glowing heart _all_ ablaze
With the love, that had lingered and grown more divine,
In the yearn of our wandering days.

How we leaped to thy arms, when we saw them extend!
How we drank of thy fervent embrace!
With its love like thyself, glowing on without end,
In the gold of thy deified face.

For our eyes were unscaled, and our hearts were unsealed;
We were melted to tears at the thought,
Of the blessings so near, that had stood unrevealed,
Of the Providence waiting unsought.

How could we have lost the firm grasp of thy hand,
With its daily improvise of love,
With its unsounded depths, like the count of the sand,
As an index, to point us above?

And now hover o'er us, great god of the day!
Let us never escape from thy wing,
For ever and ever, drive famine away,
Give wealth to our Summer and Spring.

Give us harvests of fruit, give us Winters of rest--
Let thy Provident hand never cease;
Grant the aged a home, on thy great shining breast,
When their labors shall purchase release.

Be more than we ask, give us more than our prayer--
All our wants, let thy wisdom disclose,
Till our souls shall be ripe with thy fostering care,
And made white for our future repose.

EVENING THANKSGIVING AND PRAYER.

Sinking down to thy rest,
In the deep crimson West,
Great God! thou hast taught us repose;
With thy promised return,
Without doubting, we learn,
To wait for thy further disclose.

In thy tenement high,
Blazing over the sky,
Are thy sentinels, pledge of the night;
And we know by their shine,
That thy care is divine,
And we rest without fear, till the light

Springs again from the East
With its glory increased
By the wakening pulse of the day;
And we never will doubt,
That thy naked arm, stout,
Will drive all the shadows away.

Yet we cannot forebear,
To lift up our prayer,
For we know we are wanton and weak;
And if once thou shouldst fail,
Or thy face shouldst grow pale,
Where else in the world should we seek?
For a father so kind,
To a people so blind,
In our weakness, thy strength we may trace.
Then fail not to return,
Leave us never to mourn,
The wealth of thy daily embrace.
O continue, we pray,
To bring back the glad day;
Give us always, to look on thy face!

The trembling lisp of every human soul,
Of names more potent, then their own can be,
Breathes the same lesson through, from pole to pole
To prove the certitude of Deity.
Not every eye turned upward can behold
The face that faith alone shapes into form;
Not every hand can touch the gates of gold
That outward swing in welcome from the storm.
Yet is the "Abba Father" pendant from each tongue,
And every soul a furnace for its fires;
And sacred is each song in earnest sung,
When creature to Creator thus aspires.
We blindly grope in this, our broad of day,
The two eternities to thus unite;
The silk of infancy is turned to gray
Ere we have learned to tread the path aright.
We force our providences out of reach,
Throw back the hand our Father doth extend,
And shut our ears that he may vainly teach,
And all the wealth of heaven may expend
To warm us to reliance,--shall we dare
To sneer at those who grope? We grapple air
When it is all refulgent with our God,
And we may touch his garment's hem in prayer.

THE PROPHET'S DEATH.

Groping in undiscovered realms their way,
The Prophet and his people give the day
To finding safest lodgement, till they press
Well down the grand old river, to the mouth
Of the great Western confluent--the south
Seems to add Summer to the wilderness.

They cross the river, and then settle down
To love and labor on its grassy banks;
And fortune seems to have forgot its frown.
Years of repletion fill their shattered ranks,
And youth and vigor take the place of age;
The story of their journey is retold
By only few in number; and the sage,
Who turned their faces on their god of gold,
Was bent with the plethoric weight of years,
And summoned them to worship 'mid the tears
Of many, who misgave his failing strength;
He saw their apprehensions and at length
Called them together for a final word:
"Sons of the Summer God! it is but wise
That we look out beyond the brace of years,
And question of the future. All the way
The shining surface of our god has led
Our toilsome footsteps; we must not forget
His daily nurture, nor the cloth of gold
With which he covers us--wakeful with the day,
How has he touched our eyelids with his hands,
And warmed us with his hovering! The night
Has never failed his promise of the morn.
How has his parenthood outwatched the stars;
How has the Winter melted at his glance;
How has his armor battled with the snows!
With what a tenderness he decks the fields,
And wooes the grasses from the dormant earth,
And clothes the forest with its robes of green,
As covert for the bison and the deer,
That we may find replenishment of food!
His providence has never failed our steps,
Our homage cannot cancel his regard.

"Our father! in this failing cup of years,
Help us to be re-sanctified to thee--
Thou hast not measured to our helplessness,
But with unstinted hand filled up our lives
With blessings. Fill thou alike our hearts,
That we may have no room to cherish doubt,
But answer thy embraces, as the fields
Leap up to kiss thy first recumbent rays!
Let all our dross become thy burnished gold,
Shine through each crevice of our stubbornness,
Till in transparent purity, we reach
The very essence of thy godliness!

"Brethren of the Sun!
This altar is my last: You see the fire
Leap as an answer to my late request,
And it shall bear my spirit to the sun,
And cursed the hand that stays its homeward flight!"

Fresh nerved he reached the altar with a bound,
And sank without a murmur in the flame;
His followers an instant gather round,
But he had passed out almost as he came.

They did not dare to drag him from the pile,
His life and effort had together ceased,
He passed into the future with a smile--
A smile, that he had been so quick released.
Yet, there was one (clear-sighted from the rest),
Who said she saw the essence of his form,
In brighter effigy, more richly dressed,
Fly out into the sunset; and the charm
Of her enchanted parable found faith
In many of the multitude; his death,
So like his life, had challenged all their thought
And they were ready to quiesce his fate, and sought
Some shadowed miracle to wrap his shade.
They gathered up the ashes, and forbade
Unsanctioned hands to touch them; and they reared
A rugged mound above the garnered dust,
And left him (one whom they loved less than feared).
To that sole arbiter, whose name is Just,
Our common parent, Time, whose busy hands
Rear many a sacred fane above our faults,
Flings over our excressences his sands,
And leaves no human stain to blot the sacred marble of
our vaults.

How grand is the economy of time and death!
We whet the knife for deep incision on the name
Of some misguided leader, but he fails his breath,
And all our better angels give him back to fame;
Death carries off the husk, we keep the ripened wheat,
And Time refines the kernel into choicest flour;
The atmosphere of anger is at last made sweet;
Our charity immortal glows; our passion, but an hour.
God keep us always so! It is the chosen link
That binds us to the race, and bids the Christ come in;
That holds our hands to near the eternal brink;
It saves us from ourselves, and breaks the tooth of sin.

The whitened garments at the eternal gate,
Must cover those, who have not stained another,
Or there will come that awful sentence: "Wait!
"Blood crieth from the ground! where is thy brother?"
If thus upon the living God doth set the seal
Of condemnation for the false witnessing
How will he smite the lips of those who steal
His covering from the dead, and fill the sacred spring
Of memory, with the debris of their lives;
Mixing, what God has kindly torn apart,
And making null, the severence he strives,
Between the naked soul, and sin encumbered heart!

The gem was melted, and his life went out
In unobtrusive secrecy, and all
That he brought with him, passed the silent way
Into eternity, beyond recall.
He chose no sponsor to renew his place
But gave them back to Nature, as he found;
Yet was his impress fastened on the race,
And every morn they gathered at the mound,
For many after years, till they had grown
A nation strong in numbers, and had thrown
The seeds of generation far and wide,
And found the latent valleys without guide.
The lakes are made a tribute to their spoil,
And all the riches of the virgin soil
Were tested by those hardy argonauts of old;
And though they sought no fleece of shining gold,
They penetrated all the wilderness
That lay unclaimed before them to possess.

God drops no nobler anchorage on earth,
Than those who mold a nation, and a name;
Whose travail in the wilderness gives birth
To some great epoch, without thought of fame.
The pioneers of empire, for all time,
Are gold-dust, from the placers of our homes--
The surface croppings from a nation's prime,
The mellow acre of the richest loams.
They overgrow the boundaries of life,
And push the horizon far out in space.
With lethargy they wage a ceaseless strife,
And with the whirling earth, they keep their pace.
All honor to the soul who sets his stake
Where human kind have never trenched before;
Where only God his thunders o'er it shake,
And solitude shall murmur, "nevermore."
Such men are sovereigns, though they grasp no crown,
And raise no jewelled scepter in the hand;
Yet are they Princes, in their bronze and brown,
And demonstrate their fitness to command.

The Norsemen, on the North Atlantic wave;
Columbus, passing out in unknown seas;
De Soto, gaining but an unknown grave;
The hardy Pilgrims, on their bended knees;
The Argonauts, upon the Western slope--
These are the souls no human praise can reach.
Each, in their turn, gave empire back to hope,
And all are greater than the gift of speech.
No pen can lustre their unfading claim;
No cenotaph do honor to their dust--
These are crown jewels on the brow of Fame;
Their conquest is supreme, their laurels ever just.

Yet, in the van of empire, still is left
The noiseless print of ancestry more grand;
Indentures chiseled in the highest cleft,
By giants of a long forgotten land,--
The nameless graves of centuries untold;
The ashes of the prehistoric age;
The self-forgetting litany of gold--
How vast their monuments, how broad their page!
In what a grand democracy of death
They lift their silent fingers to our years,
Melt our memorials with a single breath
In mute companionship of life and tears!

We are but pygmies to the almighty past,
The names we honor but the surface-mould;
Beneath must lie an empire far more vast,
Whose fundaments alone deserve the name of "old."

Not many years, till they had found the bed
Of copper ore upon Superior's rim;
And hither many of the hardy ones were led
By Orchas, quick in architrave, and fleet of limb;
And many the fantastic implements he shaped
For husbandry; no want of theirs escaped
His eager scrutiny--the axe and blade,
The rough-made pick, and the encumbered spade,
The vessels for the housewife, and the spear,
And other weaponry for bison and for deer.
All these were fashioned in an uncouth way,
And yet they filled the purpose of the day.

They had not reached the iron age of thought,
And what they made, necessity had taught;
But riper years must ope the "Sampson Mine,"
And wake the rugged giant, in the shine
Of a meridian sunlight; they little thought
Of what a Hercules remained unsought,
So near Missouri's border; yet, not strange
Is their indicted ignorance--their range
Was circumscribed; and iron was left to rest,
Till man had long been cradled on the breast
Of patient Mother Earth--not all at once
Did she give up her treasures; and the dunce
Must grow into philosopher with years.
Experience with its battlehood of tears,
Is Nature's great interpreter; we learn
But slowly, till the lessons fervid burn
Their impress into action; then awakes
The slow-taught pupil into higher life--
Invention is the furnace-spark of strife;
Necessity, the hand that wields the sledge
Upon the patient anvil of our needs,
And Providence makes good its wakeful pledge
With plenteous harvest; from the dormant seeds
That lie unconed beneath our very feet
We stumble on to marvels, and awake
To find some giant force, in what we meet;
And in the insects of our path, leviathans, we greet.

Time's wheels, though shaken, never fail to track
The rut of empire, without turning back;
They, ceaseless whirl, with lubricate of blood,
Drawn from a thousand channels on the way,
Unrusting, through the oxydizing flood,
To measure centuries, or mark a day.
And thus, the primal pioneers move on
To unaccustomed progress, on the banks
Of the confluent streams that scar the face
Of the great Western basin; and their ranks
Are filled with happy husbandry; the land
Gives back its tillage, with a lavish hand.

The forests and the streams were over-full
With fish, and flesh to feed them, and they pass
One conquest, to another, in the lull
Of untamed nature. Garnered as a mass
To fill their open hands, the native corn
Soon covered the rich valleys, and the plant,
So dalliant to the race, was early born,
Tobacco. They were not adamant
Against the weaknesses so close allied
To human nature; and there was excess,
And envy, emulence, and pride,
And all the ills that left their first impress;
And yet God gave them peace. No brother's hand
Was raised against a brother, and the years
Spread fruit and plenty over a fair land
Destined to futurehood of bitter, bitter tears.

DEPARTURE OF WABUN.

"Most governed is most wayward." Very true;
Repeating history doth verify
That law from malefaction always grew,
And with its ceasing, rulership must die,
Except the common sway of Deity,
When love and service shall together blend,
And man, from every earthly master free,
Shall recognize his Father and his Friend.

These ancient prairie dwellers, had no need
Of stringent government; a few to lead
In seeding and in harvest; some to guide
In matters of religion, and of form;
The rustic swain, and his compliant bride,
To join in wedlock; and in time of storm,
To smooth the little intricates of life
With counsel, sage, and thus avoiding strife,
To guide their budding nation into bloom.
All claiming unction from the prophet's shade,
Still gave their worship to the god of day,
And their oblations on the altar laid.
Yet, the responsive accident of fire
Could never be recalled--they little knew
The secret of its coming; and they shaped
No other pebbles like the one so true
To Uri's pleadings; still they kept their faith
And reared their shapely mounds to meet the sun
With his first glance, and from the morning's breath
Retain their fervency, till day was done.
From out their number, some were set apart
For game and chase. The buffalo and deer
And wild fowl, all, paid tribute to their skill,
And vale and forest echoed with their cheer.

But one of these, young Wabun, shunned the group,
And wandered by the forest streams alone.
Some called him "dreamer"; others tried to win
His mooding back to mirth; but there was none
That seemed to reach the center of his soul;
He joined not in the worship of his race,
And seemed to be so distant in his thought,
That one might search the Pleiad's in his face.

There shone a star upon the eastern rim--
So suddenly it shot upon their view,
So brilliant and so placid, never dim
Through storm and starlight, always lit anew.
They marveled much, and some were sore dismayed
To seek the portents of this stranger star;
But not so, Wabun; he, all unafraid,
Hailed it as answer from the dim afar,
And showed unwonted pleasure at its sight;
His distance seemed to shorten, and his mind
Seemed mellowed by a new-born love to man--
A quickened tenderness to help his kind.

"I wander in the forest; by the stream";
(They gave earnest audience as he spake)
"And underneath the stars--and they all tell
The story of a great, forgotten God.
I listen to the murmuring of the rain,
And to the mighty thunder of the clouds;
And see the forked lightning, in its gleam,
Strike the great oak to shivers, in its path;
I see the maize upon a thousand fields;
I see the goodly carpet on the earth--
And every grassy thread a miracle--
I see the sun upon his track of light,
The moon upon her pathway in the sky--
And all do tell of this forgotten God.
For God is of the living, not the dead:
The tree, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all,
All fill their places; but are not alive

"As we, with thought, and purpose, and design;
But each doth turn upon a steady crank
Held by a mighty and imperious hand.
The bison, and the deer, and all the birds,
Have life, and voice, and action, such as we;
And yet they have no thought, except to live.
They build no houses, lay no harvests up--
We are their masters, with the right to kill.

"All things pay tribute to our prowent hands;
All things we see are provident of us:
The sun to ripen, and the moon to watch,
The birds and flocks for us to gather flesh,
The forests and the prairies for our use,
The mines for metal, and the streams for fish--
All, all, pay tribute to our wasting hands.
Yet we are not a law unto ourselves:
Though masters, yet not gods, for we all die
And fall back into dust; yet are we great,
And greatest of earth's creatures; but for death,
We might claim highest unction; but our power
Is limited; wherefore, if we are highest type
Of creature earth, then must it surely be
That God is man, but of a higher mold;
Not subject unto death, but Lord of life.
And, if all earthly forces must conserve
Our being (highest born of all the earth),
Then back of us the great Creator stands

"Unseen, as is Eternity unseen,
But felt, as is each ripple of her waves,
Upon the shores of our unstable life.
The greater is not seen. We do not see
The very thought that holds us in control.

"Thus have I doled, and pondered on it well,
Until, upon my vision dawned that star;
And as upon some errand quickly sent
(I know not how I went, I felt so light),
I sped upon its rays, o'er vale, and hill,
And o'er a vaster water than the lakes--
A grand expanse of green and surging waves.
And, on, still on, till just before my face
A mother, and an infant at her breast,
And many seeming wise and stately men
Bending in homage and with offerings choice,
Of sweetly-scented vintage; then I sought
To find the wherefore of this sweet emprize;
And I was told this was the Son of God--
The One that was to come, the mighty One,
Redeemer of the world; that man had sinned
And he was come to set at one the race
With the All-Father; that we had been made
In God's own image; that the sun and moon
Were but his handiwork. To Him alone
(Invisible, yet always looking on)

"Should homage be ascribed. All this was short
Yet was it printed on my pliant breast,
And cannot be erased. I seek no name
And claim no higher homage for the gleam
Vouchsafed my vision of the mighty past
And prescience of the future; tis enough
To know my steps directed, and to feel
That in my darkness I have found out God.
No more the unknown God, but evermore
The ripened type of the diviner man;
And as we reap the tokens of his love,
Remember him as Father Man of men--
The Infinite Perfection of our race."

Much more he said which made a deep impress
Upon the hardy hunters, and the less
Were those who gave no sanction to his word;
The greater portion followed him in thought,
And soon in deed. The votaries of the sun
Made most malignant onslaught, and they sought
To drive the thoughtful Wabun from his "dream."
The strife was vain. They in their fervent hope
Turn to the East, into the wilderness--
The grand Druidic of the Eastern slope,
And, hid to all but God, they penetrate
The deep recesses of their broad estate.

The gentle Wabun held for many years
His hand upon the pulses of their thought;
Sometimes upon their love, sometimes their fears,
His fervent purity, its impress wrought.
He led them to the thousand untold charms
That sparkle on the rugged Eastern slope.
He bared to them the great Creator's arms,
And, in God's grandest alphabet, he read their highest hope.

Niagara was but a giant scroll,
Whereon God writ a token of his strength;
The muttering voice of its unceasing roll
Was but a cadence of the mighty length
That measures the eternities of life.
Its grandeur but one glitter of the gold
That played upon his vesture; that the strife
Of waters was the stream so cold,
Down which humanity as rudely rushed;
Without a thought for their eternal good,
With all the semblance of the Father crushed,
They pass down in the surge of death's unceasing flood.

The broad Atlantic lashing at the shore,
Was human passion--with the balance gone;
Endeafening the graces with its roar,
And blindly lashing the Eternal throne.
Into these miniatures, God thrust himself,
That every wave might glitter with his name,
That every rock might hold upon its shelf
Some semblance that their reverence might claim.
The kindlier tokens of paternal care,
On Nature's face, were beaming everywhere.

And yet, how few of us, can truly blend
The creature with Creator, in our sight;
And from the Father, grasp the hand of friend,
Whose stars of providence outshine the night!
Our eyes are fettered with an earthly bound,
Our narrow horizon will not enlarge;
Our gaze, star fixed, will drop back to the ground,
And will not with the infinite surcharge.
Only God's hand can push the barriers back,
And give our vision unimpeded range;
And with each respite, on the weary track,
Fix the unchangeable, where all is change.

RETURN AND STRIFE.

No wonder, that when Wabun passed away,
Their torpid natures should have lost the charm
That held so perfect, with its gentle sway,
Yet slacked so quickly, with the palsied arm.
Infirmities are easy to impart,
And through the generations, they come down;
But God must place his hand upon each heart,
And press each brow where he would drop a crown.

Long brotherhood of forest, storm and flood,
Had schooled them for the turbulence of life.
The wraith of Nature made them men of blood;
The war of elements, the ocean's strife,
The thunder of Niagara now heard,
The lashing of Atlantic on the beach,
The slogan of the forest--in a word
The carnival, at rife, within their reach,
All served to spur their natures into storm.
How many catch the key-note of their song
From the surrounding elements, and warm
Their frozen energies, and make them strong
In earth's unceasing alchemy! Much more
The untutored savage; he has lost the key,
And must from Nature's chalice find the door,
Through which to penetrate life's mystery.

And many generations passed away,
Since these stern foresters had dwelt apart
From their ancestral brethren; till the day
When in their higher prowess, from the heart
Of the great forest fastnesses, they spring
As panthers, on their unsuspecting prey.
They have grown strong in weaponry, yet cling
To Deity, in their untutored way.
The "happy hunting ground" to them is Heaven;
And the "Great Spirit" still to them is God;
Yet, from their hearts, all tender passions driven,
They smite their brethren with a heavy rod.
A long and ceaseless struggle, many years,
Alternately, invasion and defense,
Till they are driven southward; and the fears,
That Kohen's prophecy would be fullfilled
And back of this, the agony intense
Of impotence in prayer so deeply chilled
The hearts of these poor children of the sun,
That they gave easy conquest to their foes;
And thus the struggle stubbornly begun,
So unresisting now, was finished without blows.