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Burst with a sudden blaze
Stars of the August days,
With Autumn's breath.

Fain would the calyx hold;
But splits, and half the gold
Spills lavishly:

Frost, that the rose appalls,
Wastes not thy coronals,
Till Summer's lustre falls
And fades in thee.

IMPROVISATION.

Near in the forest
I know a glade;
Under the tree-tops
A secret shade!

Vines are the curtains,
Blossoms the floor;

Voices of waters

Sing evermore.

There, when the sunset's

Lances of gold

Pierce, or the moonlight

Is silvery cold,

Would that an angel

Led thee to me
So, out of loneliness

Love should be!

Never the breezes

Should lisp what we say,

Never the waters

Our secret betray!

Silence and shadow,

After, might reign;

But the old life be ours

Never again!

DECEMBER.

The beech is bare, and bare the ash,
The thickets white below;

The fir-tree scowls with hoar moustache,
He cannot sing for snow.

The body-guard of veteran pines,

A grim battalion, stands;

They ground their arms, in ordered lines,

For Winter so commands.

The waves are dumb along the shore,
The river's pulse is still;

The north-wind's bugle blows no more

Reveillé from the hill.

The rustling sift of falling snow,

The muffled crush of leaves,

These are the sounds suppressed, that show

How much the forest grieves;

But, as the blind and vacant Day

Crawls to his ashy bed,

I hear dull echoes far away,

Like drums above the dead.

Sigh with me, Pine that never changed!
Thou wear'st the Summer's hue;

Her other loves are all estranged,

But thou and I are true!

TO THE NILE.

My sterious Flood, - that through the silent sands.
Hast wandered, century on century,
Watering the length of great Egyptian lands,
Which were not, but for thee,

Art thou the keeper of that eldest lore,
Written ere yet thy hieroglyphs began,
When dawned upon thy fresh, untrampled shore
The earliest life of Man?

Thou guardest temple and vast pyramid,
Where the gray Past records its ancient speech;
But in thine unrevealing breast lies hid

What they refuse to teach.

All other streams with human joys and fears
Run blended, o'er the plains of History:
Thou tak'st no note of Man; a thousand years
Are as a day to thee.

What were to thee the Osirian festivals ?

Or Memnon's music on the Theban plain?
The carnage, when Cambyses made thy halls
Ruddy with royal slain?

Even then thou wast a God, and shrines were built
For worship of thine own majestic flood;

For thee the incense burned, for thee was spilt

The sacrificial blood.

And past the bannered pylons that arose

Above thy palms, the pageantry and state,
Thy current flowed, calmly as now it flows,
Unchangeable as Fate.

HOEKZEMA, Poetry. 4th Ed.

21

Thou givest blessing as a God might give,
Whose being is his bounty: from the slime
Shaken from off thy skirts the nations live,
Through all the years of Time.

In thy solemnity, thine awful calm,
Thy grand indifference of Destiny,

My soul forgets its pain, and drinks the balm
Which thou dost proffer me.

Thy godship is unquestioned still: I bring
No doubtful worship to thy shrine supreme;
But thus my homage as a chaplet fling,
To float upon thy stream!

ON LEAVING CALIFORNIA.

O fair young land, the youngest, fairest far
Of which our world can boast,

Whose guardian planet, Evening's silver star
Illumes thy golden coast, -

How art thou conquered, tamed in all the pride
Of savage beauty still!

How brought, O panther of the splendid hide,
To know thy master's will!

No more thou sittest on thy tawny hills
In indolent repose;

Or pour'st the crystal of a thousand rills
Down from thy house of snows.

But where the wild-oats wrapped thy knees in gold,
The ploughman drives his share,

And where, through canons deep, thy streams are

The miner's arm is bare.

rolled,

Yet in thy lap, thus rudely rent and torn

A nobler seed shall be:

Mother of mighty men,

thou shalt not mourn

Thy lost virginity!

Thy human children shall restore the grace
Gone with thy fallen pines:

The wild, barbaric beauty of thy face
Shall round to classic lines.

And Order, Justice, Social Law shall curb
Thy untamed energies;

And Art and Science, with their dreams superb,
Replace thine ancient ease.

The marble, sleeping in thy mountains now,
Shall live in sculptures rare;

Thy native oak shall crown the sage's brow,
Thy bay, the poet's hair.

Thy tawny hills shall bleed their purple wine,
Thy valleys yield their oil;

And Music, with her eloquence divine,
Persuade thy sons to toil.!

Till Hesper, as he trims his silver beam,
No bappier land shall see,

And Earth shall find her old Arcadian dream
Restored again in thee!

NAPOLEON AT GOTHA.

We walk amid the currents of actions left undone,
The germs of deeds that wither, before they see the sun.
For every sentence uttered, a million more are dumb:
Men's lives are chains of chances, and History their sum.

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