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Each glistening eye and flushing cheek
In light and flame repeating!

We come in one tumultuous tide,

One surge of wild emotion,

As crowding through the Frith of Clyde

Rolls in the Western Ocean;

As when yon cloudless, quartered moon
Hangs o'er each storied river,

The swelling breasts of Ayr and Doon

With sea-green wavelets quiver.

FOR THE BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 137

The century shrivels like a scroll,

The past becomes the present,

And face to face, and soul to soul,

We greet the monarch-peasant.

--

While Shenstone strained in feeble flights

With Corydon and Phillis,

While Wolfe was climbing Abraham's heights

To snatch the Bourbon lilies,

Who heard the wailing infant's cry,
The babe beneath the shieling,
Whose song to-night in every sky
Will shake earth's starry ceiling,

Whose passion-breathing voice ascends
And floats like incense o'er us,
Whose ringing lay of friendship blends
With labor's anvil chorus?

We love him, not for sweetest song,
Though never tone so tender;

We love him, even in his wrong,

His wasteful self-surrender.

138 FOR THE BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION.

We praise him, not for gifts divine,

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His manhood breathes in

Was ever heart more human?

every line,

We love him, praise him, just for this:

In every form and feature,

Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss,

He saw his fellow-creature!

No soul could sink beneath his love,

Not even angel blasted;

No mortal power could soar above
The pride that all outlasted!

Ay! Heaven had set one living man

Beyond the pedant's tether,

His virtues, frailties, HE may scan,
Who weighs them all together!

I fling my pebble on the cairn

Of him, though dead, undying;

Sweet Nature's nursling, bonniest bairn
Beneath her daisies lying.

FOR THE BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 139

The waning suns, the wasting globe,

Shall

spare

the minstrel's story,

The centuries weave his purple robe,

The mountain-mist of glory!

BIRTHDAY OF DANIEL WEBSTER.

JANUARY 18, 1856.

WHEN life hath run its largest round
Of toil and triumph, joy and woe,
How brief a storied page is found
To compass all its outward show!

The world-tried sailor tires and droops;
His flag is rent, his keel forgot;

His farthest voyages seem but loops

That float from life's entangled knot.

But when within the narrow space

Some larger soul hath lived and wrought, Whose sight was open to embrace

The boundless realms of deed and thought,

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