Changing the pure emotion
Of her high devotion,

To a skin-deep sense

Of her own eloquence;

Strong to deceive, strong to enslave-
Save, oh! save.

From the ingrain'd fashion

Of this earthly nature

That mars thy creature;

From grief that is but passion,
From mirth that is but feigning,
From tears that bring no healing,
From wild and weak complaining,
Thine old strength revealing,

Save, oh! save.

From doubt, where all is double;
Where wise men are not strong,
Where comfort turns to trouble,
Where just men suffer wrong;
Where sorrow treads on joy,
Where sweet things soonest cloy,
Where faiths are built on dust,
Where love is half mistrust,

Hungry, and barren, and sharp as the sea-
Oh! set us free.

O let the false dream fly,

Where our sick souls do lie

Tossing continually!

O where thy voice doth come

Let all doubts be dumb,
Let all words be mild,

All strifes be reconciled,
All pains beguiled!

Light bring no blindness,
Love no unkindness,

Knowledge no ruin,

Fear no undoing!

From the cradle to the grave,
Save, oh! save.

HUMAN LIFE.

WHAT mortal, when he saw,

Life's voyage done, his heavenly Friend,
Could ever yet dare tell him fearlessly:
'I have kept uninfringed my nature's law;
The inly-written chart thou gavest me,

To guide me, I have steer'd by to the end'?

Ah! let us make no claim,

On life's incognisable sea,

To too exact a steering of our way;

Let us not fret and fear to miss our aim,
If some fair coast has lured us to make stay,
Or some friend hail'd us to keep company.

Ay! we would each fain drive

At random, and not steer by rule.

Weakness! and worse, weakness bestow'd in vain!
Winds from our side the unsuiting consort rive,
We rush by coasts where we had lief remain;
Man cannot, though he would, live chance's fool.

No! as the foaming swath

Of torn-up water, on the main,

Falls heavily away with long-drawn roar

On either side the black deep-furrow'd path
Cut by an onward-labouring vessel's prore,
And never touches the ship-side again;

Even so we leave behind,

As, charter'd by some unknown Powers,
We stem across the sea of life by night,
The joys which were not for our use design'd;-
The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours.

TO A GIPSY CHILD BY THE

SEA-SHORE,

DOUGLAS, ISLE OF MAN.

WHO taught this pleading to unpractised eyes?
Who hid such import in an infant's gloom?

Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?

Who mass'd, round that slight brow, these clouds of doom?

Lo sails that gleam a moment and are gone;
The swinging waters, and the cluster'd pier.

Not idly Earth and Ocean labour on,

Nor idly do these sea-birds hover near.

But thou, whom superfluity of joy

Wafts not from thine own thoughts, nor longings vain,

Nor weariness, the full-fed soul's annoy

Remaining in thy hunger and thy pain;

Thou, drugging pain by patience; half averse
From thine own mother's breast, that knows not thee;
With eyes which sought thine eyes thou didst con-

verse,

And that soul-searching vision fell on me.

Glooms that go deep as thine I have not known:
Moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth.
Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own:
Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth.

What mood wears like complexion to thy woe?
'His, who in mountain glens, at noon of day,
Sits rapt, and hears the battle break below?
-Ah! thine was not the shelter, but the fray.

Some exile's, mindful how the past was glad?
Some angel's, in an alien planet born?
-No exile's dream was ever half so sad,
Nor any angel's sorrow so forlorn.

Is the calm thine of stoic souls, who weigh
Life well, and find it wanting, nor deplore;
But in disdainful silence turn away,

Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more?

Or do I wait, to hear some grey-hair'd king
Unravel all his many-colour'd lore;

Whose mind hath known all arts of governing,
Mused much, loved life a little, loathed it more?

Down the pale cheek long lines of shadow slope,

Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give.

-Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope,

Foreseen thy harvest, yet proceed'st to live.

O meek anticipant of that sure pain

Whose sureness grey-hair'd scholars hardly learn! What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain? What heavens, what earth, what suns shalt thou discern?

Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star,
Match that funereal aspect with her pall,

I think, thou wilt have fathom'd life too far,
Have known too much- -or else forgotten all.

The Guide of our dark steps a triple veil
Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps ;
Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale
Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps.

Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labour's dull, Lethæan spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse

Of the soil'd glory, and the trailing wing;

And though thou glean, what strenuous gleaners may, In the throng'd fields where winning comes by strife;

And though the just sun gild, as mortals pray,
Some reaches of thy storm-vext stream of life;

Though that blank sunshine blind thee; though the cloud

That sever'd the world's march and thine, be gone;
Though ease dulls grace, and Wisdom be too proud
To halve a lodging that was all her own—

Once, ere thy day go down, thou shalt discern,
Oh once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain !
Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return,
And wear this majesty of grief again.