ALL THINGS ONCE ARE THINGS ALL things once are things for ever; Once betrayed from childly faith, JULIA WARD HOWE. BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC. | As he died to make men holy, let us MINE eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on. 1 have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps, His day is marching on. I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on!" He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat; Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me; die to make men free, While God is marching on! [From Thoughts in Père la Chaise.] IMAGINED REPLY OF ELOISA TO THE POET'S QUESTIONING. "WHAT was I cannot tell - thou know'st our story, Know'st how we stole God's treasure from on high; Without heaven's virtue we had heaven's glory, Too justly our delights were doomed to die. "Intense as were our blisses, e'en so painful The keen privation it was ours to share; states, all places barren proved All and baneful, Dead stones grew pitiful at our despair; "Till, to the cloister's solitude repairing, Our feet the way of holier sorrows trod, Hid from each other, yet together sharing The labor of the Providence of God She ranged my hair with gem or flower, Careful, the festal draperies hung, My highest joy she could not share, "And she shall live with me," I said, Or else, methought, some farmer bold Should woo and win my gentle Lizzie, Thus Faith, cast out of barren creeds, Shall rest in emblems of her own; Beauty, still springing from Decay, The cross-wood budding to the crown. THE DEAD CHRIST. TAKE the dead Christ to my chamber, The Christ I brought from Rome; Over all the tossing ocean, He has reached his western home; Bear him as in procession, And lay him solemnly Where, through weary night and morning, He shall bear me company. And I should stock her house four-The name I bear is other fold, Be with her wedding blithely busy. But lo! Consumption's spectral form Sucks from her lips the flickering breath; In these pale flowers, these tear-drops warm, I bring the mournful dower of Death. Than than that I bore by birth, And I've given life to children But the time comes swiftly towards Who'll grow and dwell on earth; me When the dead Christ will be more (Nor do I bid it stay), to me Than all I hold to-day. Lay the dead Christ beside me, Oh, press him on my heart, I would hold him long and painfully Till the weary tears should start; Till the divine contagion Heal me of self and sin, And the cold weight press wholly down The pulse that chokes within. Reproof and frost, they fret me, Towards the free, the sunny lands, From the chaos of existence I stretch these feeble hands; And, penitential, kneeling, Pray God would not be wroth, Who gave not the strength of feeling And strength of labor both. Thou'rt but a wooden carving, |