Here are no spindles, nor wheels to be whirled,
No forges nor looms from the outside world,
Stunning the ear with clamour;
You hear but the whisper of leaves unfurled,
And the tap of the woodpecker's hammer
Here are no books to be written or read,
But cushions of softest moss instead,
Without a care to cumber;
And fern-leaf fans for the weary head,
Soothing the soul to slumber
Oh! come from the dusty haunts of trade,
From the desk, the ledger, the loom, the spade;
There is neither toil nor payment.
Forget for once, in this peaceful shade,
The sordid ways in which dollars are made,
And food and drink and raiment.
Consider the lilies, arrayed so fair,
In robes that an eastern king might wear,
Though never an eye may heed them;
And the sparrows, of whom His hand takes care,
For our Father in Heaven feeds them.
His rainbow spans the heavenly blue;
His eye takes note of the drops of dew,
And the sunset's golden arrows;
And shall He not take thought of you,
O man, as well as the sparrows?
SCIENCE, THE ICONOCLAST.
"Oh! spare dual idols of the past,
Whose lips are dumb, whose eyes are dim;
Truth's diadem is not for him
Who comes, the fierce Iconoclast:
Who wakes the battle's stormy blast,
Hears not the angel's choral hymn"
THE IMAGE-BREAKER
Ah me! for we have fallen on evil days,
When science, with remorseless cold precision,
Puts out the flame of poetry, and lays
Her double-convex lens on fancy's vision.
When not a star has longer leave to shine,
Unweighed, unanalysed, reduced to gases,—
Resolved to something in the chemist's line,
By those miraculously long-ranged glasses.
The awful mysteries which Nature locks
Deep in her stony bosom, hid for ages,—
The hieroglyphics of primeval rocks,
Are glibly written out on short-hand pages.
Within that rocky scroll, her palimpsest,
The hand of time still writes, and still effaces
Records in dolomite—and shale—and schist,
The pre-historic history of Races.
Cave-dwellers, under nameless strata hid,
Vast bones of extinct monsters that were fossil,
Ere the first Pharaoh built the pyramid,
And shaped in stone his sepulchre colossal.
What undiscovered secret yet remains
Beneath the swirl and sway of billows tidal,
Since Art triumphant led the deep in chains,
And on the mane of ocean laid her bridle.