Raving politics, never at rest as this poor earth's pale history runs,

What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, truthless violence mourn'd by the Wise,

Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of lies upon lies;

Stately purposes, valor in battle, glorious annals of army and fleet,

Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, trumpets of victory, groans of defeat;

Innocence seeth'd in her mother's milk, and Charity setting the martyr aflame;

Thraldom who walks with the banner of Freedom, and recks not to ruin a realm in her name ;

Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools;

Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow'd up by her vassal legion of fools;

Trade flying over a thousand seas with her

spice and her vintage, her silk and her corn;

Desolate offing, sailorless harbors, famishing populace, wharves forlorn ;

Star of the morning, Hope in the sunrise ; gloom of the evening, Life at a close; Pleasure who flaunts on her wide downway with her flying robe and her poison'd

rose;

Pain, that has crawl'd from the corpse of Pleasure, a worm which writhes all day, and at night

Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back to the curse of the light;

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone;

Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty; Flattery gilding the rift in a throne;

Fame blowing out from her golden trumpet a jubilant challenge to Time and to Fate;

Slander, her shadow, sowing the nettle on all the laurell'd graves of the Great ;

Love for the maiden, crown'd with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been, Household happiness, gracious children,

debtless competence, golden mean;

National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire; Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapp'd in a moment of fire;

He that has liv'd for the lust of a minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind;

He that has nail'd all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind;

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth;

All new-old revolutions of Empire change of the tide what is all of it worth?

CROSSING THE BAR

SUNSET and evening star,

And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the bound-
less deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and
Place

The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have cross'd the bar.

E'en so-but why the tale reveal
Of those whom, year by year unchanged,
Brief absence join'd anew to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?

At dead of night their sails were fill'd,
And onward each rejoicing steer'd:
Ah, neither blame, for neither will'd,
Or wist, what first with dawn appear'd!

To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,
Brave barks! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass
guides,-

To that, and your own selves, be true.

But O blithe breeze, and O great seas,
Though ne'er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last!

One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold where'er they fare,
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas,
At last, at last, unite them there!

FROM "THE BOTHIE OF TOBERNA-VUOLICH"

THE BATHERS

THERE is a stream, I name not its name,

lest inquisitive tourist

Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide-books, Springing far off from a loch unexplor'd in the folds of great mountains, Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped Then for four more in a forest of pine, where broad and ample Spreads, to convey it, the glen with heathery slopes on both sides : Broad and fair the stream, with occasional falls and narrows;

But, where the glen of its course approaches the vale of the river, Met and block'd by a huge interposing mass of granite,

Scarce by a channel deep-cut, raging up, and raging onward,

Forces its flood through a passage so narrow a lady would step it.

Beautiful there for the color deriv'd from green rocks under ;

Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam up-rising

Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness.

Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendant birch boughs,

Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway,

Still more enclosed from below by wood and rocky projection.

You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water,

Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.

Here, the pride of the plunger, you stride the fall and clear it ;

Here, the delight of the bather, you roll in beaded sparklings,

Here into pure green depth drop down from lofty ledges.

Hither, a month agone, they had come and discover'd it; hither (Long a design, but long unaccountably left unaccomplish'd),

Leaving the well-known bridge and pathway above to the forest,

Turning below from the track of the carts over stone and shingle, Piercing a wood, and skirting a narrow and