Your life's proud aim, your art's high truth,
Have kept the promise of your youth;
And while you won the crown which now
Breaks into bloom upon your brow,
My soul cried strongly out to you
Across the ocean's yearning blue,
While, unremembered and afar,
I watched you, as I watch a star
Through darkness struggling into view,
And loved you better than you knew.

I used to dream, in all these years
Of patient faith and silent tears,
That Love's strong hand would put aside
The barriers of place and pride,-

Would reach the pathless darkness through
And draw me softly up to you.

But that is past; if should stray

you

Beside my grave some future day,
Perchance the violets o'er my dust
Will half betray their buried trust,
And say, their blue eyes full of dew,
"She loved you better than you knew."

A Pen of Steel

Give me a pen of steel!

Away with the gray goose-quill!
I will grave the thoughts I feel
With a fiery heart and will:

I will grave with the stubborn pen
On the tablets of the heart,

Words never to fade again

And thoughts that shall ne'er depart.

Give me a pen of steel!

Hardened and bright and keen,— To run like the chariot wheel,

When the battle-flame is seen:And give me the warrior's heart,

To struggle thro' night and day,

And to write with this thing of art Words clear as the lightning's play.

Give me a pen of steel!

The softer age is done,

And the thoughts that lovers feel Have long been sought and won:— No more of the gray goose-quill

No more of the lover's lay

I have done with the minstrel's skill,
And I change my path to-day.

Give me a pen of steel!

I will tell to after-times How nerve and iron will

Are poured to the world in rhymes:How the soul is changed to power,

And the heart is changed to flame,
In the space of a passing hour
By poverty and shame!

Pan in Wall Street

A. D. 1867

Just where the Treasury's marble front
Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations;
Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont
To throng for trade and last quotations;
Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold
Outrival, in the ears of people,
The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled
From Trinity's undaunted steeple,-

Even there I heard a strange, wild strain
Sound high above the modern clamor,
Above the cries of greed and gain,

The curbstone war, the auction's hammer; And swift, on Music's misty ways,

It led, from all this strife for millions,
To ancient, sweet-do-nothing days
Among the kirtle-robed Sicilians.

And as it stilled the multitude,

And yet more joyous rose, and shriller, I saw the minstrel, where he stood

At ease against a Doric pillar: One hand a droning organ played,

The other held a Pan's-pipe (fashioned

Like those of old) to lips that made

The reeds give out that strain impassioned.

'T was Pan himself had wandered here A-strolling through this sordid city, And piping to the civic ear

The prelude of some pastoral ditty! The demigod had crossed the seas,

From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr, And Syracusan times, to these

Far shores and twenty centuries later.

A ragged cap was on his head;

But-hidden thus-there was no doubting That, all with crispy locks o'erspread,

His gnarlèd horns were somewhere sprouting; His club-feet, cased in rusty shoes,

Were crossed, as on some frieze you see them, And trousers, patched of divers hues,

Concealed his crooked shanks beneath them.

He filled the quivering reeds with sound,
And o'er his mouth their changes shifted,
And with his goat's-eyes looked around
Where'er the passing current drifted;
And soon, as on Trinacrian hills

The nymphs and herdsmen ran to hear him, Even now the tradesmen from their tills,

With clerks and porters, crowded near him.