HOPE AND DESPAIR
I tread the maze of the changing wood,
And though no light through the maples plays,
Yet they glow each one,
Like a rose-red sun,
And drop their leaves, like a glittering flood
Of warm sunbeams, in the woodland ways.
Poor human heart, in the year of life
All seasons are, and it rests with thee
To enjoy them all,
Or to drape a pall
O'er withered hopes, and to be at strife
With things that are, and no brightness see.
CARLOTTA.
Poor, lone Carlotta, Mexico's mad Queen,
Babbling of him, amid thy vacant halls,
Whose ears have long been heedless of thy calls;
Sad monument of pomp that once hath been,
Thy staring eyes mark ever the same scene
Of levelled muskets, and a corpse which falls,
Dabbled in blood, beneath the city walls—
Though twenty years have rolled their tides between.
Not of this world thy vengeance! They have passed,
Traitor and victim, to the shadow-land.
Not of this world thy joy; but, when at last
Reason returns in Paradise, its hand
Shall join the shattered links of thought again,
Save those that form this interval of pain.
EQUALITY.
Mad fools! To think that men can be
Made equal all, when God
Made one well nigh divinity
And one a soulless clod.
Nowhere in Nature can we find
Things equal, save in death,
One man must rule with thoughtful mind,
One serve with panting breath.
The maples spread their foliage green
To shade the grass below,
Hills rise the lowly vales between
Or streams would never flow.
A million creatures find a home
Within a droplet's sphere,
And giants through the woodlands roam
While quakes the land in fear.
A tiny fall in music breaks
Against the mountain's base,
While roars an avalanche and shakes
The whole world in its race.
One must be weak and one be strong,
One huge, another small,
To help this teeming world along,
And make a home for all.
Equality is death, not life,
In Nature and with man,
And progress is but upward strife
With some one in the van.
LACHINE.
You named it better than you knew
Who called yon little town Lachine,
Though through the lapse of years between
The then and now, men jeered at you.
You thought by it to find a way,
Through voiceful woods and shimmering lakes,
To where the calm Pacific breaks
On weedy ledges at Cathay.
In fancy you beheld yon tide
Upbear a thousand argosies,
Whose spicy odors filled the breeze,
And floated far on every side.
'Twas but a wish-born dream, men said,
And sneered that you were so unwise.
Blind scoffers! Would that they could rise
A few short moments from the dead,
To see how, through the power of man,
Your vision is no more a dream,
And learn that this majestic stream
Is now the highway to Japan!
From year to year, with dauntless strides,
O'er fertile plains your sons have pressed,
Portaging from the East to West,
Between the two great ocean tides.
And in their trail they drew a chain
Of steel across the virgin land,
Uniting with this slender band
The eastern and the western main.
Where once the bison roamed, and woke
The heavens with his thunderous tread,
The tireless engine speeds instead,
And tosses high its plumes of smoke.
Like spider in a web, it creeps
On filmy bridge, o'er sparkling streams,
Or chasms where the sunlight gleams
Part-way, and dies amid the deeps.
It scales the rugged, snow-clad peaks,
And looks afar on East and West,
Then, like an eagle from its nest,
Darts down, and through the valley shrieks.
It was not formed by Nature's hand,
This sun-ward highway to Japan;
O'er mountain-range and prairie, man
Has forced the path his genius planned.
And Commerce, universal king,
Has followed with unnumbered needs,
And scatters everywhere the seeds
Of towns that in a night upspring.
In tumult strange the air abounds,
The whirr of birds is dying out,
The swart mechanic's lusty shout
Amid the clang of iron sounds.
And streams, that once unbroken ran,
Now on their outspread scroll reveal,
Written by many a sliding keel,
The lordly signature of man.