THE splendor falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river: Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever.

199

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes

flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

[U. s. A.]

THE APOLOGY.

THINK me not unkind and rude,
That I walk alone in grove and glen;

I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I

Fold my arms beside the brook; Each cloud that floated in the sky Writes a letter in my book.

Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand

Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery

But 't is figured in the flowers;

Was never secret history

But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field

Homeward brought the oxen strong; A second crop thy acres yield, Which I gather in a song.

TO EVA.

O fair and stately maid, whose eyes
Were kindled in the skies
upper
At the same torch that lighted mine;
For so I must interpret still
Thy sweet dominion o'er my will,
A sympathy divine.

Ah, let me blameless gaze upon
Features that seem at heart my own;

Nor fear those watchful sentinels, Who charm the more their glance forbids, Chaste-glowing, underneath their lids,

With fire that draws while it repels.

THINE EYES STILL SHONE.

Was woven still by the snow-white choir. At last she came to his hermitage,

I lonely roved the land or sea: As I behold yon evening star, Which yet beholds not me.

This morn I climbed the misty hill, And roamed the pastures through; How danced thy form before my path, Amidst the deep-eyed dew!

Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine
height;

Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now,
For I did not bring home the river and
sky;

He sang to my ear, they sang to my

cage ;

The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, "I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of
youth."

As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs ;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird ;-
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

THE PROBLEM.

I LIKE a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles, Yet not for all his faith can see Would I that cowléd churchman be.

Why should the vest on him allure, Which I could not on me endure?

Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,
The canticles of love and woe.
The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity.

Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Know'st thou what wove yon wood-
bird's nest

Of leaves, and feathers from her breast; Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, Painting with morn each annual cell; Or how the sacred pine-tree adds

To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone;
And morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's Abbeys bends the sky
As on its friends with kindred eye;
For, out of Thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air,
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.

These temples grew as grows the grass;
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast Soul that o'er him planned,
And the same power that reared the
shrine,

Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Ever the fiery Pentecost

Girds with one flame the countless host, Trances the heart through chanting choirs,

And through the priest the mind inspires.

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.
I know what say the Fathers wise,
The book itself before me lies,
Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,
And he who blent both in his line,
The younger Golden Lips or mines,
Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines;
His words are music in my ear,
I see his cowléd portrait dear,
And yet, for all his faith could see,
I would not the good bishop be.

BOSTON HYMN.

THE word of the Lord by night
To the watching Pilgrims came,

As they sat by the seaside,

And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more;

Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

201

How it swells!

How it dwells

On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells,

To the rhyming and the chiming of the

bells!

Hear the loud alarum bells,

Brazen bells!

What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!

In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,

Out of tune,

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,

In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire.

Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now -now to sit or never,

By the side of the pale-faced moon.
O, the bells, bells, bells,

What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!

How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour

On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,

And the clanging,

How the danger ebbs and flows; Yet the ear distinctly tells,

In the jangling,

And the wrangling,

How the danger sinks and swells,

By the sinking or the swelling in the

anger of the bells

Of the bells

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells,

In the clamor and the clangor of the

bells!

Hear the tolling of the bells,

Iron bells!

What a world of solemn thought their monody compels !

In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright

203

At the melancholy menace of their tone!

For every sound that floats

From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.

And the people, -ah, the people, —
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,

And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling

On the human heart a stone,
They are neither man nor woman,
They are neither brute nor human,
They are Ghouls:

And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls

A pæan from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells

With the pean of the bells!
And he dances and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pean of the bells, -
Of the bells:

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the throbbing of the bells, -
Of the bells, bells, bells,

To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,

As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells,

To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, -
Bells, bells, bells,

To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

ROBERT BROWNING.

EVELYN HOPE.

BEAUTIFUL Evelyn Hope is dead!

Sit and watch by her side an hour. That is her book-shelf, this her bed; She plucked that piece of geraniumflower,

Beginning to die, too, in the glass. Little has yet been changed, I think,