FOR THE MEETING OF THE NATIONAL SANITARY

ASSOCIATION.

1860.

WHAT makes the Healing Art divine?
The bitter drug we buy and sell,

The brands that scorch, the blades that shine,

The scars we leave, the " cures we tell?

Are these thy glories, holiest Art,

The trophies that adorn thee best,

Or but thy triumph's meanest part,

Where mortal weakness stands confessed?

We take the arms that Heaven supplies

For Life's long battle with Disease,
Taught by our various need to prize

Our frailest weapons, even these.

But ah! when Science drops her shield

Its peaceful shelter proved in vain — And bares her snow-white arm to wield The sad, stern ministry of pain;

When shuddering o'er the fount of life,
She folds her heaven-anointed wings,

To lift unmoved the glittering knife
That searches all its crimson springs;

When, faithful to her ancient lore,

She thrusts aside her fragrant balm For blistering juice, or cankering ore, And tames them till they cure or calm;

When in her gracious hand are seen
The dregs and scum of earth and seas,
Her kindness counting all things clean
That lend the sighing sufferer ease;

Though on the field that Death has won, She saves some stragglers in retreat;

These single acts of mercy done

Are but confessions of defeat.

What though our tempered poisons save Some wrecks of life from aches and ails: Those grand specifics Nature gave

Were never poised by weights or scales!

God lent his creatures light and air,
And waters open to the skies;
Man locks him in a stifling lair,

And wonders why his brother dies!

In vain our pitying tears are shed,
In vain we rear the sheltering pile
Where Art weeds out from bed to bed
The plagues we planted by the mile!

Be that the glory of the past;

With these our sacred toils begin: So flies in tatters from its mast

The yellow flag of sloth and sin,

And lo! the starry folds reveal

The blazoned truth we hold so dear:

To guard is better than to heal,

The shield is nobler than the spear!

MUSA.

O MY lost Beauty!-hast thou folded quite

Thy wings of morning light

Beyond those iron gates

Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,

And Age upon his mound of ashes waits

To chill our fiery dreams,

Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?

Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,

Whose flowers are silvered hair!

Have I not loved thee long,

Though my young lips have often done thee wrong, And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?

Ah, wilt thou yet return,

Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?

Come to me! I will flood thy silent shrine

With my soul's sacred wine,

And heap thy marble floors

As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores

In leafy islands walled with madrepores

And lapped in Orient seas,

When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in the breeze.

Come to me!

thou shalt feed on honeyed words,

Sweeter than song of birds;·

No wailing bulbul's throat,

No melting dulcimer's melodious note,

When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,

Thy ravished sense might soothe

With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.

Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,

Sought in those bowers of green

Where loop the clustered vines

And the close-clinging dulcamara * twines,

Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,

dens,

The "bitter-sweet" of New England is the Celastrus scan

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"Bourreau des arbres" of the Canadian French.