THE BUILDERS. ALL are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time, Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme. Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best; For the structure that we raise, Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these; Leave no yawning gaps between; Think not, because no man sees, In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the Gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen; Else our lives are incomplete, And ascending and secure Shall to-morrow find its place. Thus alone can we attain To those turrets, where the eye And one boundless reach of sky. SAND OF THE DESERT IN AN HOUR-GLASS. A HANDFUL of red sand, from the hot clime Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, How many weary centuries has it been How many strange vicissitudes has seen, How Perhaps the camels of the Ishmaelite When into Egyt from the patriarch's sight Perhaps the feet of Moses, burnt and bare, Or Pharaoh's flashing wheels into the air Or Mary, with the Christ of Nazareth Whose pilgrimage of hope and love and faith Or anchorites beneath Engaddi's palms And singing slow their old Armenian psalms Or caravans, that from Bassora's gate Or Mecca's pilgrims, confident of Fate, These have passed over it, or may have passed! And as I gaze, these narrow walls expand; Stretches the desert with its shifting sand, And borne aloft by the sustaining blast, Dilates into a column high and vast, And onward, and across the setting sun, The column and its broader shadow run, The vision vanishes! These walls again Shut out the hot, immeasurable plain; BIRDS OF PASSAGE. BLACK shadows fall From the lindens tall, That lift aloft their massive wall Against the southern sky; And above, in the light Of the star-lit night, Swift birds of passage wing their flight 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. THE OPEN WINDOW. THE old house by the lindens I saw the nursery windows The large Newfoundland house-dog They walked not under the lindens, But shadow, and silence, and sadness The birds sang in the branches, With sweet, familiar tone; But the voices of the children Will be heard in dreams alone! And the boy that walked beside me, Why closer in mine, ah! closer, I pressed his warm, soft hand! |