THE DAY'S RATION.

WHEN I was born,

From all the seas of strength Fate filled a chalice,
Saying, This be thy portion, child; this chalice,
Less than a lily's, thou shalt daily draw

From my great arteries; nor less, nor more.
All substances the cunning chemist Time
Melts down into that liquor of my life,
Friends, foes, joys, fortunes, beauty, and disgust,
And whether I am angry or content,

Indebted or insulted, loved or hurt,

All he distils into sidereal wine,

And brims

my little cup; heedless, alas!

Of all he sheds how little it will hold,
How much runs over on the desert sands.

If a new muse draw me with splendid ray,

And I uplift myself into her heaven,
The needs of the first sight absorb my blood,
And all the following hours of the day

Drag a ridiculous age.

To-day, when friends approach, and every hour

Brings book or starbright scroll of genius,

The tiny cup will hold not a bead more,

And all the costly liquor runs to waste,
Nor gives the jealous time one diamond drop
So to be husbanded for poorer days.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Why need I galleries, when a pupil's draught

After the master's sketch, fills and o'erfills

My apprehension? Why should I roam,
Who cannot circumnavigate the sea

Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn

The nearest matters to another moon?

Why see new men

Who have not understood the old ?

BLIGHT.

GIVE me truths,

For I am weary of the surfaces,

And die of inanition. If I knew

Only the herbs and simples of the wood,

Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, and pimpernel,

Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,

Milkweeds, and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,

Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,

Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,—
O that were much, and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun,

And planted world, and full executor

Of their imperfect functions.

But these young scholars who invade our hills,

Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,

And travelling often in the cut he makes,

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.

The old men studied magic in the flower,

And human fortunes in astronomy,

And an omnipotence in chemistry,

Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,

And wheresoever their clear eyebeams fell,

They caught the footsteps of the SAME.

Our eyes

Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine;
The injured elements say, Not in us;
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant, and mineral say, Not in us,

And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain,
We devastate them unreligiously,

And coldly ask their pottage, not their love,
Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us

Only what to our griping toil is due;

But the sweet affluence of love and song,

The rich results of the divine consents

Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,

The nectar and ambrosia are withheld;

And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves

And pirates of the universe, shut out

Daily to a more thin and outward rind,

Turn pale and starve.

Therefore to our sick eyes,

The stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay.
And nothing thrives to reach its natural term,

And life, shorn of its venerable length,
Even at its greatest space, is a defeat,

And dies in anger that it was a dupe,
And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
Is early frugal like a beggar's child:
With most unhandsome calculation taught,
Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,
Like Alpine cataracts, frozen as they leaped,
Chilled with a miserly comparison

Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.