Stood serene and down the future saw the golden beam

incline

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith

divine,

By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet

I track,

Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns

One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet

hearts hath burned

Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands,

On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his

hands;

Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,

While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe

return

To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden

urn.

"T is as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle

slaves

Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers'

graves;

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light

a crime ;

Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?

Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make

Plymouth rock sublime?

They were men of present valor, stalwart old icono

clasts,

Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the

Past's;

But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free,

Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee

The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them. across the sea.

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,

Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar

fires;

Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our

haste to slay,

From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral

lamps away

To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of

to-day?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;

Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's bloodrusted key.

SUMMER STORM.

UNTREMULOUS in the river clear,

Toward the sky's image, hangs the imaged bridge;

So still the air, that I can hear

The slender clarion of the unseen midge;

Out of the stillness, with a gathering creep, Like rising wind in leaves, which now decreases, Now lulls, now swells, and all the while increases, The huddling trample of a drove of sheep Tilts the loose planks, and then as gradually ceases In dust on the other side; life's emblem deep, A confused noise between two silences,

Finding at last in dust precarious peace.