Brain-throbs and heart-beats are the deathless forces
That lead us, lift us, where the day abides.

Still up and onward, up and forward, surges
The toiling race near-drawing to the goal,
While truth with whips of angel-anger urges
The craven one to prove a master soul.

Quote not the Past! Its regal courts were rabble,
A puny herd of worse than worthless things;
The world moves upward through their beastly babble;
The tireless toilers are the only kings!

Yes, man himself, the fruit of long endeavor,
Grows from the smallness of his ancient youth,

And shall, at last perfected, stand forever
An angel shaped and fashioned to the truth!

THE TOIL OF EMPIRE.

BY JOHN VANCE CHENEY.

"Westward the course of empire takes its way;

Time's noblest offspring is the last."

The suns go over; of a truth,

Full soon the circuit will be run;

But the long toil of empire done,

Shall gray Time bear, and shame her youth?

The reek and din of press and car,

Serfdom of distance, sky-fire, steam-
Are these more than the early dream,

The joyance of the morning star?

The faith, the wisdom winged with fire,
The open days when visions were!
Shall noblest sons be born of her
That mocks the prophet and his lyre?

From morn to night, from night to morn,
Full soon the circuit will be run;

But the long toil of empire done,
What joy unknown to God's first-born?

THE DAY LOVE CAME.

BY THEODOSIA PICKERING.

I opened wide the chambers of my heart,
I set aside all that was good and best,-
All I had loved before I put apart,

To make a royal dwelling for my guest,
The day Love came.

I purified the soul and heart of me

Till they were clear as some wood-hidden lake, I loosened the old dreams and set them free With ever-willing hand, for his dear sake, The day Love came.

Of the old self there was not left a part,
But sudden glory flooded soul and brain,
And the vast, empty chambers of the heart
Filled with such ecstacy 'twas almost pain,
The day Love came.

THE CRY OF THE POOR.

BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.

HE air is burdened with the half-smothered cry of the

THE

poor. Their lines have gone out to the end of the earth; there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. From every land and nation, from every clime and kindred, there comes up, as if from the abyss, what Lord Byron, in one of the powerful passages of Childe Harold, describes as

A long, low, distant murmur of dread sound.

In an old Oriental classic something is said to the effect that the poor we have always with us. This day is that saying fulfilled in the presence of us all. with us; and we are ourselves the poor.

The poor we have
It is our own cry,

then, that we hear echoing around the gulfs and coasts of the world. So be it. But let us reason together a little about this awful condition of poverty among mankind.

We say mankind, because the disease of poverty is universal. The world is smitten with it as with an epidemic. The Eastern races are nearly all in a state bordering on pauperism. Ever and anon they pass the line and perish by thousands and millions. Whoever will put his ear to the earth may hear the moan of the dying. Oh, it is pitiful! The great regions of Asia are strown with the decaying carcasses of the wretched beings that have died before their day from sheer want of the means of living longer. Beggary and semistarvation are the estate of more than four hundred millions of Asiatics a number six times as great as the entire population of the United States. The teeming islands of the sea, beautiful and fertile, are little more than pauper sepulchres that have swallowed up emaciated humanity until the very earth is a cake of man-mold, rimy and poisonous. Strange to remark that there is less starvation in Africa than in either Asia or Europe. Stranger still, that the portent of pauperism is already on the horizon of America. Unless the baneful

forces that are now rampant in our civilization can be reversed, our land also will become aye, it is becominga receptacle for millions of famished dead.

The onfall of general poverty in the United States was not to have been anticipated. No such thing was apprehended by the strong forefathers who laid the foundations of our estate. We had here at the first a clean landscape and an open opportunity. Ours was a virgin world, as our ancestors saw it, rising dewy and sunlit from the waters. They found it and entered it, and made a covenant that it should be the home of freedom and if of freedom, then the home also of abundance and hope forever. For poverty is the concomitant shadow of slavery - the premonition of it in every age and nation.

Boundless were the resources of glebe and valley, of field and hillside, of lake and forest, when our mighty pioneers began to build us into colony and state and nation. Nothing more bountiful ever offered itself to the cheerful hopes and ennobling ambitions of men than was revealed to the sober, industrious, and frugal people who came here out of smothered Europe and began, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to occupy this glorious and prophetic land. It was the new Atlantis. Population came on like a sunrise. Intelligence abounded. Just before the Revolution there was not a native adult in all New England who could not read and write. We got on well. Poverty was unknown. Like patriot Titans we shook ourselves out of the Old-World condition and began an auspicious career of peace and plenty. We abandoned the past. We abolished primogeniture. We sent entail into the limbo by the moon. We mocked at Dei gratia as an absurd delusion of antiquity. We declared three inalienable rights of man; namely, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiWe ought to have added the free possession of land. Under such auspices why should poverty have ever supervened in the United States? Why should the voice of the poor ever be heard rising like a wail from plantation, hamlet, and cityful? Why should there be seen standing at the door of the homes of the American people the gaunt spectreWANT?

ness.