Have I not saints by dozens

Around the chapter roomThe twelve, the four, the martyrs, And all to guard my tomb?— With lines of singing angels

To rise through light and gloom?

Who says this pile of marble
Is vanity throughout?

Do not the crowned confessors
Guard all the porch about?
Then, as the viper lives to sting,
Let these, my mockers flout.

Yes, it is hard for thirty years
To hew and chip the stone-
To fix the rainbow in the glass-
To build the saints a throne;
And then for sneering monks to grudge
A grave within one's own.

It is a costly work of mine,

This prison-house of song,

With underneath the sainted dead,

Above, the angel throng,

And everywhere the shecinah

Of incense all day long.

Vibrate with music night and day,
Ye organ-pipes of gold;

Let the tall roof shake with the psalms

And voices manifold,

When the deep thunder of the bass
Shall echo strong and bold!

Then let the mass sound long and loud—
The psalm go echoing up—
Theirs be the liquor and the wine,

Be mine the graven cup

Now I have thought the matter out
I can contented sup.

HARVEST RHYMES.

WHEN the red, ripe wheat is flowing, billow-blowing

like a sea,

When the reapers call each other, early mornings on the lea;

When the poppies burn in scorn of the pale light of the dawn,

And the corn-flower tells its sorrow to its love, the kingly bee.

Now through soft mists cloudy purple rise the firtrees one by one,

Now the broad disks of the wheat-fields blaze like

gold shields in the sun;

The cattle low, the breezes blow, and the sickles glitter keen,

Ruddy faces moving eager, glistening steel by flashes seen.

This fair earth is slowly fashioned from dead lilies,

so they say,

Withered roses, honied pleasures, all a-bloom but

yesterday;

So life's fashioned-rendered fertile by its long

corrupted joy,

Watered by the tears of childhood and the weeping of the boy.

Heaven's hermit, high and lonely, soaring as none other can

Praising with a simple music raining on the husbandman;

Over plough, and corn, and reaper, golden stubble. fallow grey,

Springs the lark, and craves a blessing on the coming harvest day.

Poet of the upper air, never knowing human

care,

Happy as a new-crowned angel in thy sanctity of

song,

Glad in summer and in autumn, in the frost and in

the sun,

What a lesson for the worldling, fainting ere he's well begun.

THE SMITH'S CHORUS.

GIVE us a hand, my mate,

Are we not fellows?

Have we not twenty years

Toiled at these bellows? Have we not, hand and hand, Smitten together;

Now with a thunder stroke,

Now with a feather?

Seen the sparks, streaming up,

Iron turn vapour— Laughed as the bar of steel

Dripped like a taper;

Moulded the leadlike clay,

Plying the bellows,

Then, Roger, take my hand,

Are we not fellows?