THE DIVINITY

'YES, write it in the rock,' Saint Bernard said, 'Grave it on brass with adamantine pen! 'Tis God himself becomes apparent, when God's wisdom and God's goodness are display'd,

'For God of these his attributes is made.'—
Well spake the impetuous Saint, and bore of men
The suffrage captive; now, not one in ten
Recalls the obscure opposer he outweigh'd."

God's wisdom and God's goodness!—Ay, but fools
Mis-define these till God knows them no more.
Wisdom and goodness, they are God !—what schools

Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore? This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules; 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.

IMMORTALITY

FOIL'D by our fellow-men, depress'd, outworn, We leave the brutal world to take its way, And, Patience! in another life, we say,

The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne.

And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn The world's poor, routed leavings? or will they, Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day, Support the fervours of the heavenly morn?

No, no! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun ;
And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing-only he, His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH
THE KID

He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save.
So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried :"
'Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,

'Who sins, once wash'd by the baptismal wave.' So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sigh'd, The infant Church! of love she felt the tide Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.

And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs,
With suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid

eye

Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs, She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drewAnd on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.

MONICA'S LAST PRAYER'

'AH could thy grave at home, at Carthage, be!'—
Care not for that, and lay me where I fall!
Everywhere heard will be the judgment-call;
But at God's altar, oh! remember me.

Thus Monica, and died in Italy.

Yet fervent had her longing been, through all
Her course, for home at last, and burial
With her own husband, by the Libyan sea.

Had been but at the end, to her pure soul
All tie with all beside seem'd vain and cheap,
And union before God the only care.

Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole. Yet we her memory, as she pray'd, will keep, Keep by this Life in God, and union there!

DRAMATIC POEMS