Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer ;

Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three,

Yet collegisse juvat, I am glad

That here what colleging was mine I had,
It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!

Nearer art thou than simply native earth, My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie;

A closer claim thy soil may well put forth, Something of kindred more than sympathy;

For in thy bounds I reverently laid away

That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,

That portion of my life more choice to me (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole)

Than all the imperfect residue can be ;

The Artist saw his statue of the soul

Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke,
The earthen model into fragments broke,

And without her the impoverished seasons roll.

THE PIONEER.

WHAT man would live coffined with brick and stone, Imprisoned from the influences of air,

And cramped with selfish landmarks everywhere, When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone, The unmapped prairie none can fence or own?

What man would read and read the selfsame faces, And, like the marbles which the windmill grinds, Rub smooth for ever with the same smooth minds, This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull traces,

When there are woods and un-man-stifled places ?

What man o'er one old thought would pore and pore,

Shut, like a book, between its covers thin

For every fool to leave his dog's-ears in, When solitude is his, and God for evermore, Just for the opening of a paltry door?

What man would watch life's oozy element
Creep Letheward for ever, when he might

Down some great river drift beyond men's sight,

To where the undethroned forest's royal tent

Broods with its hush o'er half a continent?

What man with men would push and altercate,

Piecing out crooked means for crooked ends,
When he can have the skies and woods for friends,

Snatch back the rudder of his undismantled fate,

And in himself be ruler, church, and state?

Cast leaves and feathers rot in last year's nest,

The winged brood, flown thence, new dwellings plan;

The serf of his own Past is not a man ;

To change and change is life, to move and never rest ;— Not what we are, but what we hope, is best.

The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind;
Cities rob men of eyes and hands and feet,

Patching one whole of many incomplete ;
The general preys upon the individual mind,
And each alone is helpless as the wind.

Each man is some man's servant; every soul Is by some other's presence quite discrowned; Each owes the next through all the imperfect round, Yet not with mutual help; each man is his own goal, And the whole earth must stop to pay his toll.

Here, life the undiminished man demands;

New faculties stretch out to meet new wants;

What Nature asks, that Nature also grants;

Here, man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and hands, And to his life is knit with hourly bands.

Come out, then, from the old thoughts and old ways,

Before you harden to a crystal cold

Which the new life can shatter, but not mould; Freedom for you still waits, still, looking backward, stays, But widens still the irretrievable space.

LONGING.

Of all the myriad moods of mind

That through the soul come thronging,

Which one was e'er so dear, so kind,
So beautiful, as Longing?

The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment,

Before the Present poor and bare
Can make its sneering comment.

Still, through our paltry stir and strife,
Glows down the wished Ideal,

And Longing moulds in clay what Life
Carves in the marble Real;

To let the new life in, we know,

Desire must ope the portal;

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