Too late!" through God's infinite world,
From his throne to life's nethermost fires,
"Too late!" is a phantom that flies at the dawn
Of the soul that repents and aspires.
If pure thou hast made thy desires,
There's no height the strong wings of immortals may gain
Which in striving to reach thou shalt strive for in vain.
Then, up to the contest with fate,
Unbound by the past, which is dead!
What though the heart's roses are ashes and dust?
What though the heart's music be fled?
Still shine the fair heavens o'erhead;
And sublime as the seraph who rules in the sun
Beams the promise of joy when the conflict is won!
CHOICE AND CHANGE.
THREE maidens at a fair, one day,
Chose each a flower from out the same boquet.
One chose a violet; "May my life," said she,
Like this sweet flower's, be passed in privacy!"
Another a glad Hebe-deftly chose
From the rare cluster an imperial rose:-
"May life for me," she said, "through all its hours,
Be bright like thine, thou empress of the flowers!"
A third the lily chose. "I mark in thee,
Passion," she whispered, wed to purity."
The maiden shy who fain had dwelt apart,
Led Fashion's Queen--though with aching heart.
She, whose warm soul the yearning hope did crave
A bliss, rich, rose-like,-filled an early grave!
While she who loved the lily,-hapless maid!-
Perished forlorn,- dishonored and betrayed!
WHILE sauntering through the crowded street
Some half-remembered face I meet,
Albeit upon no mortal shore
That face, methinks, hath smiled before.
Lost in a gay and festal throng,
I tremble at some tender song
Set to an air whose golden bars
I must have heard in other stars.
In sacred aisles I pause to share
The blessings of a priestly prayer —
When the whole scene which greets mine eyes
In some strange mode I recognize
As one whose every mystic part
I feel prefigured in my heart.
At sunset, as I calmly stand,
A stranger on an alien strand
Familiar as my childhood's home
I would not miss the air of chastened grace Which breathed divinely from thy patient face, Tells of love's watchful anguish, merged in rest;
Naught would I miss of all thou hast, or art,
O! friend supreme, whose constant, stainless heart,
Doth house unknowing, many an angel guest;
Their presence keeps thy spiritual chambers pure; While the flesh fails, strong love grows more and
Divinely beautiful with perished years;
Thus, at each slow, but surely deepening sign
Of life's decay, we will not, Sweet! repine,
Nor greet its mellowing close with thankless tears;
Love's spring was fair, love's summer brave and bland,
But through love's autumn mist I view the land, The land of deathless summers yet to be;
There, I behold thee, young again and bright,
In a great flood of rare transfiguring light,
But there as here, thou smilest, Love! on me!
IN THE WHEAT-FIELD.
WHEN the lids of the virgin Dawn unclose,
When the earth is fair and the heavens are calm,
And the early breath of the wakening rose
Floats on the air in balm,
I stand breast-high in the pearly wheat
That ripples and thrills to a sportive breeze
Borne over the field with its Hermes feet,
And its subtle odor of Southern seas;
While out of the infinite azure deep
The flashing wings of the swallows sweep,
Buoyant and beautiful, wild and fleet,
Over the waves of the whispering wheat.
Aurora faints in the fulgent fire
Of the Monarch of Morning's bright embrace, And the summer day climbs higher and higher Up the cerulean space;
The pearl-tints fade from the radiant grain,
And the sportive breeze of the ocean dies,
And soon in the noontide's soundless rain
The field seems graced by a million eyes; Each grain with a glance from its lidded fold, As bright as a gnome's in his mine of gold, While the slumbrous glamor of beam and heat Glides over and under the windless wheat.
Yet the languid spirit of lazy Noon,
With its minor and Morphean music rife, Is pulsing in low, voluptuous tune
With summer's lust of life.
Hark! to the droning of drowsy wings,
To the honey-bees as they go and come,
To the "boomer" scarce rounding his sultry rings,
The gnat's small horn, and the beetle's hum;
And hark to the locust!- Noon's one shrill song,
Like the tingling steel of an elfin gong,
Grows lower through quavers of long retreat
To swoon on the dazzled and distant wheat.
Now Day declines! and his shafts of might
Are sheathed in a quiver of opal haze;
Still through the chastened, but magic light,
What sunset grandeurs blaze!
For the sky, in its mellowed lustre, seems
Like the realm of a master poet's mind—
A shifting kingdom of splendid dreams -
With fuller and fairer truths behind;
And the changeful colors that blend or part
Ebb like the tides of a living heart,
And the splendor melts and the shadows meet,
And the tresses of Twilight trail over the wheat.
Thus Eve creeps slowly and shyly down,
And the gurgling notes of the swallows cease, They flicker aloft through the foliage brown, In the ancient vesper peace;
But a step like the step of a conscious fawn
Is stealing with many a pause — this way, Till the hand of my love through mine is drawn, Her heart on mine in the tender ray;
O hand of the lily, O heart of truth,
O love, thou art faithful and fond as Ruth;
But I am the gleaner -- of kisses - Sweet,
While the starlight dawns on the dimpling wheat!
I THINK, oftimes, that lives of men may be
Likened to wandering winds that come and go,
Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow
O'er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee.
Some lives are buoyant zephyrs sporting free
In tropic sunshine; some long winds of woe
That shun the day, wailing with murmurs low,
Through haunted twilights, by the unresting sea;
Others are ruthless, stormful, drunk with might,
Born of deep passion or malign desire:
They rave 'mid thunder-peals and clouds of fire.
Wild, reckless all, save that some power unknown
Guides each blind force till life be overblown,
Lost in vague hollows of the fathomless night.
A GNARLED and massive oak log, shapeless, old,
Hewed down of late from yonder hill-side gray,
Grotesquely curved, across our hearth-stone lay;
About it, serpent-wise, the red flames rolled
In writhing convolutions; fold on fold
They crept and clung with slow portentous sway
Of deadly coils; or in malignant play.
Keen tongues outflashed, twixt vaporous gloom and gold.
Lo! as I gazed, from out that flaming gyre
There loomed a wild, weird image, all astrain
With strangled limbs, hot brow, and eyeballs dire,
Big with the anguish of the bursting brain:
Laocoon's form, Laocoon's fateful pain,
A frescoed dream on flickering walls of fire!
DAY follows day; years perish; still mine eyes
Are opened on the self-same round of space;
Yon fadeless forests in their Titan grace,
And the large splendors of those opulent skies.
I watch, unwearied, the miraculous dyes
Of dawn or sunset; the soft boughs which lace
Round some coy Dryad in a lonely place,
Thrilled with low whispering and strange sylvan
sighs: -
Weary? The poet's mind is fresh as dew,
And oft refilled as fountains of the light.
His clear child's soul finds something sweet and
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