Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten;—
If Nature can subsist on three,

Thank Heaven for three. Amen!
I always thought eold victual nice;—
My choice would be vanilla-ice.

I care not much for gold or land;—

Give me a mortgage here and there,— Some good bank-stock, some note of hand, Or trifling railroad share,—

I only ask that Fortune send
A little more than I shall spend.

Honors are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names;
I would, perhaps, be Plenipo,—
But only near St. James;

I'm very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator's chair.

Jewels are baubles; 't is a sin

To care for such unfruitful things;— One good-sized diamond in a pin,— Some, not so large, in rings,—

A ruby, and a pearl, or so,

Will do for me;—I laugh at show.

My dame should dress in cheap attire (Good, heavy silks are never dear);— I own perhaps I might desire

Some shawls of true Cashmere,— Some marrowy crapes of China silk, Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.

I would not have the horse I drive So fast that folks must stop and stare; 'An easy gait—two forty-five—

Suits me; I do not care;— Perhaps, for just a single spurt, Some seconds less would do no hurt.

Of pictures, I should like to own Titians and Raphaels three or four,— I love so much their style and tone, One Turner, and no more

(A landscape, foreground golden dirt,— The sunshine painted with a squirt).

Of books but few,—some fifty score

For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor;—

Some little luxury there

Of red morocco's gilded gleam

And vellum rich as country cream.

Busts, cameos, gems,—such things as these,
Which others often show for pride,
I value for their power to please,

And selfish churls deride;—

One Stradivarius, I confess,

Two Meerschaums, I would fain possess.

Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn,

Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;—
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But all must be of buhl?

Give grasping pomp its double share,—
I ask but one recumbent chair.

Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch;
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them much,—
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!

805

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL [1819-1891]

THE PRESENT CRISIS

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast

Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west, And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him

climb

To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of
Time.

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,

When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro;

At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,

Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart, And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.

So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies with
God

In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,

Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler

clod.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right or

wrong;

Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast

frame

Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—

In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil

side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,

Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the

right,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that

light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt

stand,

Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?

Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 't is Truth alone is strong,

And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea;

Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly;

Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the

Word;

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,

But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,

List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave

within,—

'They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.'

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched

the earth with blood,