LXII.

SORROW.

COUNT each affliction, whether light or grave,
God's messenger sent down to thee; do thou
With courtesy receive him; rise and bow ;
And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave
Permission first his heavenly feet to lave;
Then lay before him all thou hast; allow

No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow,

Or mar thy hospitality; no wave

Of mortal tumult to obliterate

The soul's marmoreal calmness: Grief should be

Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate;

Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free;

Strong to consume small troubles; to commend

Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.

AUBREY DE VERE (THE YOUNGER).

LXIII.

NATIONAL APOSTASY.

TRAMPLING a dark hill, a red sun athwart,

I saw a host that rent their clothes and hair,
And dashed their spread hands 'gainst that sunset glare,
And cried, Go from us, God, since God Thou art!
Utterly from our coasts and towns depart,

Court, camp, and senate-hall, and mountain bare;
Our pomp Thou troublest, and our feast dost scare,
And with Thy temples dost confuse our mart!
Depart Thou from our hearing and our seeing:
Depart Thou from the works and ways of men;
Their laws, their thoughts, the inmost of their being:
Black nightmare, hence! that earth may breathe again !
"Can God depart?" I said. A Voice replied,
Close by-"Not so! each Sin at heart is Deicide."

LXIV.

HUMANITY.

THERE is a soul above the soul of each,

A mightier soul, which yet to each belongs: There is a sound made of all human speech,

And numerous as the concourse of all songs : And in that soul lives each, in each that soul, Though all the ages are its lifetime vast; Each soul that dies, in its most sacred whole Receiveth life that shall for ever last.

And thus for ever with a wider span

Humanity o'erarches time and death;

Man can elect the universal man,

And live in life that ends not with his breath:

And gather glory that increases still

Till Time his glass with Death's last dust shall fill.

SYDNEY DOBELL.

LXV.

THE ARMY SURGEON.

OVER that breathing waste of friends and foes,
The wounded and the dying, hour by hour,
In will a thousand, yet but one in power,
He labours through the red and groaning day.
The fearful moorland where the myriads lay
Moves as a moving field of mangled worms :
And as a raw brood, orphaned in the storms,
Thrust up their heads if the wind bend a spray
Above them, but when the bare branch performs
No sweet paternal office, sink away
With helpless chirp of woe,-so, as he goes,
Around his feet in clamorous agony

They rise and fall; and all the seething plain
Bubbles a cauldron vast of many-coloured pain.

LXVI.

THE COMMON GRAVE.

LAST night beneath the foreign stars I stood,
And saw the thoughts of those at home go by
To the great grave upon the hill of blood.
Upon the darkness they went visibly,

Each in the vesture of its own distress.

Among them there came One, frail as a sigh,

And like a creature of the wilderness

Dug with her bleeding hands. She neither cried

Nor wept; nor did she see the many stark

And dead that lay unburied at her side.

All night she toiled; and at that time of dawn,

When Day and Night do change their More and Less,

And Day is more, I saw the melting Dark

Stir to the last, and knew she laboured on.