That ship must heed her master's beck,

Her helm obey his hand,

And seamen tread her reeling deck

As if they trod the land.

Her oaken ribs the vulture-beak
Of Northern ice may peel;
The sunken rock and coral peak
May grate along her keel;

And know we well the painted shell
We give to wind and wave,
Must float, the sailor's citadel,

Or sink, the sailor's grave!

Ho! strike away the bars and blocks,
And set the good ship free!

Why lingers on these dusty rocks

The young bride of the sea?

Look! how she moves adown the grooves,

In graceful beauty now!

How lowly on the breast she loves

Sinks down her virgin prow!

God bless her! wheresoe'er the breeze
Her snowy wing shall fan,
Aside the frozen Hebrides,
Or sultry Hindostan !

Where'er, in mart or on the main,

With peaceful flag unfurled, She helps to wind the silken chain Of commerce round the world!

Speed on the ship! But let her bear
No merchandise of sin,

No groaning cargo of despair

Her roomy hold within;

No Lethean drug for Eastern lands,
Nor poison-draught for ours;
But honest fruits of toiling hands

And Nature's sun and showers.

Be hers the Prairie's golden grain,
The Desert's golden sand,
The clustered fruits of sunny Spain,
The spice of Morning-land!
Her pathway on the open main
May blessings follow free,

And glad hearts welcome back again
Her white sails from the sea!

THE WORSHIP OF NATURE.

THE harp at Nature's advent strung
Has never ceased to play;

The song the stars of morning sung
Has never died away.

And

prayer

is made, and praise is given,

5

By all things near and far;

The ocean looketh up to heaven,

And mirrors every star.

Its waves are kneeling on the strand,

As kneels the human knee,

Their white locks bowing to the sand,
The priesthood of the sea!

They pour their glittering treasures forth,
Their gifts of pearl they bring,

10

The green earth sends her incense up
From many a mountain shrine;
From folded leaf and dewy cup
She pours her sacred wine.

The mists above the morning rills
Rise white as wings of prayer;

The altar-curtains of the hills
Are sunset's purple air.

The winds with hymns of praise are loud,
Or low with sobs of pain,-

The thunder-organ of the cloud,
The dropping tears of rain.

With drooping head and branches crossed
The twilight forest grieves,

Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost

From all its sunlit leaves.

The blue sky is the temple's arch,

Its transept earth and air,

The music of its starry march

The chorus of a prayer.

So Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began,

And all her signs and voices shame

The prayerless heart of man.

35

40

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL was born February 22, 1819, at Elmwood, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the house where he died August 12, 1891. His early life was spent in Cambridge, and he has sketched many of the scenes in it very delightfully in Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, in his volume of Fireside Travels, as well as in his early poem, An Indian Summer Reverie. His father was a Congregationalist minister of Boston, and the family to which he belonged has had a strong representation in Massachusetts. His grandfather, John Lowell, was an eminent jurist, the Lowell Institute of Boston owes its endowment to John Lowell, a cousin of the poet, and the city of Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, an uncle, who was one of the first to begin the manufacturing of cotton in New England.

Lowell was a student at Harvard, and was graduated in 1838, when he gave a class poem, and in 1841 his first volume of poems, A Year's Life, was published. His bent from the beginning was more decidedly literary than that of any contemporary American poet. That is to say, the history and art of literature divided his interest with the production of literature, and he carries the unusual gift of rare critical power, joined to hearty, spontaneous creation. It may indeed be guessed that the keenness of judgment and incisiveness of wit which characterize his examination of literature have sometimes interfered with his poetic power,

and made him liable to question his art when he would rather have expressed it unchecked. In connection with Robert Carter, a littérateur who has lately died, he began, in 1843, the publication of The Pioneer, a Literary and Critical Magazine, which lived a brilliant life of three months. A volume of poetry followed in 1844, and the next year he published Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, a book which is now out of print, but interesting as marking the enthusiasm of a young scholar, treading a way then almost wholly neglected in America, and intimating a line of thought and study in which he afterward made most noteworthy ventures. Another series of poems followed in 1848, and in the same year The Vision of Sir Launfal. Perhaps it was in reaction from the marked sentiment of his poetry that he issued now a jeu d'esprit, A Fable for Critics, in which he hit off, with a rough and ready wit, the characteristics of the writers of the day, not forgetting himself in these lines:

“There is Lowell, who 's striving Parnassus to climb

With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme ;
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders;
The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;
His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,
But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell,
And rattle away till he 's old as Methusalem,

At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem."

This, of course, is but a half serious portrait of himself, and it touches but a single feature; others can say better that Lowell's ardent nature showed itself in the series of satirical poems which made him famous, The Biglow Papers, written in a spirit of indignation and fine scorn, when the Mexican War was causing many Americans to blush with shame at the use of the country by a class for its own ignoble ends. The true patriotism which marked these and