SONNET.

Let us do our work as well,

Both the unseen and the seen;

Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,

Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure

Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain

To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

SONNET

ON MRS. KEMBLE'S READINGS FROM SHAKSPEARE.

O PRECIOUS evenings! all too swiftly sped!
Leaving us heirs to amplest heritages

Of all the best thoughts of the greatest sages,

And giving tongues unto the silent dead!

How our hearts glowed and trembled as she read,

Interpreting by tones the wondrous pages

Of the great poet who foreruns the ages,

Anticipating all that shall be said!

O happy Reader! having for thy text

The magic book, whose Sibylline leaves have caught

The rarest essence of all human thought!

O happy Poet! by no critic vext!

How must thy listening spirit now rejoice

To be interpreted by such a voice!

K K

251

A HANDFUL of red sand, from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought,

Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought.

How many weary centuries has it been
About those deserts blown!

How many strange vicissitudes has seen,
How many histories known!

Perhaps the camels of the Ishmaelite
Trampled and passed it o'er,

When into Egypt from the patriarch's sight
His favorite son they bore.

253

SAND IN AN HOUR-GLASS.

Perhaps the feet of Moses, burnt and bare,
Crushed it beneath their tread ;

Or Pharaoh's flashing wheels into the air
Scattered it as they sped;

Or Mary, with the Christ of Nazareth
Held close in her caress,

Whose pilgrimage of hope and love and faith
Illumed the wilderness;

Or anchorites beneath Engaddi's palms
Pacing the Dead Sea beach,

And singing slow their old Armenian psalms
In half-articulate speech;

Or caravans, that from Bassora's gate
With westward steps depart;

Or Mecca's pilgrims, confident of Fate,
And resolute in heart;

These have passed over it, or may have passed!
Now in this crystal tower
Imprisoned by some curious hand at last,

It counts the passing hour.

And as I gaze, these narrow walls expand;-
Before my dreamy eye

Stretches the desert with its shifting sand.
Its unimpeded sky.

And borne aloft by the sustaining blast,
This little golden thread

Dilates into a column high and vast,
A form of fear and dread.

And onward, and across the setting sun,
Across the boundless plain,

The column and its broader shadow run,
Till thought pursues in vain.

The vision vanishes! These walls again
Shut out the lurid sun,

Shut out the hot, immeasurable plain;
The half-hour's sand is run!

BIRDS OF PASSAGE.

255

But the night is fair,

And everywhere

A warm, soft vapor fills the air,

And distant sounds seem near;

And above, in the light

Of the star-lit night,

Swift birds of passage wing their flight
Through the dewy atmosphere.

I hear the beat

Of their pinions fleet,

As from the land of snow and sleet

They seek a southern lea.

I hear the cry

Of their voices high

Falling dreamily through the sky,

But their forms I cannot see.

O, say not so!

Those sounds that flow

In murmurs of delight and woe

Come not from wings of birds.

They are the throngs

Of the poet's songs,

Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,

The sound of winged words.

This is the cry

Of souls, that high

On toiling, beating pinions fly,

Seeking a warmer clime.

From their distant flight

Through realms of light

It falls into our world of night,

With the murmuring sound of rhyme.