A Psalm of Life.

ELL me not, in mournful numbers,

TE

Life is but an empty dream;

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem!"

Life is real! Life is earnest !

And the grave is not its goal: "Dust thou art, to dust returnest," Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow
Is our destined end or way;
But to act that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act, act in the living Present,

Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time:

THE DAY'S RATION.

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

231

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

Know Thyself.

ΝΩΘΙ σεαυτόν ! And is this the prime

ΓΝΩ

And heaven-sprung adage of the olden time?

Say, can'st thou make thyself? Learn first that trade:
Haply thou may'st know what thyself had made.

What hast thou, Man, that thou dost call thine own?
What is there in thee, Man, that can be known?
Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought,

A phantom dim, of past and future wrought,
Vain sister of the worm, life, death, soil, clod.
Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!

SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE.

The Day's Ration.

WHEN I was born,

WHE

From all the seas of strength Fate filled a chalice,
Saying, "This be thy portion, child; this chalice,
Less than a lily's, thou shalt daily draw

From my great arteries-nor less nor more."
All substances the cunning chemist Time
Melts down into that liquor of my life—

Friends, foes, joys, fortunes, beauty, and disgust;
And whether I am angry or content,
Indebted or insulted, loved or hurt,
All he distills into sidereal wine,

And brims my little cup; heedless, alas!
Of all he sheds, how little it will hold,
How much rains over on the desert sands.
If a new Muse draw me with splendid ray,
And I uplift myself into its heaven,
The needs of the first sight absorb my blood,
And all the following hours of the day
Drag a ridiculous age.

To-day, when friends approach, and every hour
Brings book, or star-bright scroll of genius,
The little cup will hold not a bead more,
And all the costly liquor runs to waste;
Nor gives the jealous lord one diamond-drop,
So to be husbanded for future days.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Why need I galleries, when a pupil's draught,
After the master's sketch, fills and o'erfills
My apprehension? Why seek Italy,

Who cannot circumnavigate the sea

Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn
The nearest matters for a thousand days?

RALPH W. EMERSON.

Extract.

Y genial spirits fail;

MY

And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off

It were a vain endeavor,

Though I should gaze forever

On that green light that lingers in the west,

I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life whose fountains are within.

SUN AND SHADOW.

O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature liye;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud,
And would we aught behold of higher worth
Than that inanimate, cold world, allowed
To the poor loveless, ever anxious crowd,
Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair, luminous cloud,
Enveloping the earth:

And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element !

233

SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE.

Sun and Shadow.

As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green,

To the billows of foam-crested blue,

Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue.

Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
Now white as the sea-gull she flies on her way,
The sun gleaming bright on her sail.

Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun,-
Of breakers that whiten and roar ;

How little he cares if in shadow or sun

They see him who gaze from the shore!

He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
To the rock that is under his lee,

As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea.

Thus drifting afar to the dim vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,

The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade.

Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark,
We'll trim our broad sail as before,

And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,

Nor ask how we look from the shore!

OLIVER W. HOLMES.

Retribution.

Ὀψὲ θεῶν ἀτέουσι μύλοι, ἀλέουσι δὲ λεπτά.
("The mills of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.")

GREEK POET.

THO

THE ABOVE PARAPHRASED.

HOUGH the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small :

Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness

grinds he all.

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

Careless seems the Great Avenger; history's pages but

record

One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the

Word:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; But that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim un

known

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His

own!

JAMES R. Lowell.