WHAT TIIE VOICE SAID.

u He alone, whose hand is bounding Human power and human will,

Looking through each soul's surrounding, Knows its good or ill.

"For thyself, while wrong and sorrow
Make to thee their strong appeal,

Coward wert thou not to utter
What the heart must feel.

"Earnest words must needs be spoken When the warm heart bleeds or burns

With its scorn of wrong, or pity
For the wronged, by turns.

"But, by all thy nature's weakness,
Hidden faults and follies known,

Be thou, in rebuking evil,
Conscious of thine own.

"Not the less shall stern-eyed Duty

To thy lips her trumpet set,
But with harsher blasts shall mingle

Wailings of regret."

Cease not, "Voice of holy speaking,
Teacher sent of God, be near,

Whispering through the day's cool silence,
Let my spirit hear!

So, when thoughts of evil doers
Waken scorn or hatred move,

Shall a mournful fellow-feeling
Temper all with love.

TO DELAWARE.

Written during the discussion in the Legislature of that StftJa in the winter of 1846-7, of a bill for the abolition of Slayery.

Thrice welcome to thy sisters of the East,

To the strong tillers of a rugged home, With spray-wet locks to Northern winds released,

And hardy feet o'er-swept by ocean's foam; And to the young nymphs of the golden West,

Whose harvest mantles, fringed with prairfo bloom, Trail in the sunset,—oh, redeemed and blest,

To the warm welcome of thy sisters come I Broad Pennsylvania, down her sail-white bay

Shall give thee joy, and Jersey from her plains, And the great lakes, where echo free alway

Moaned never shoreward with the clank of chains, Shall weave new sun-bows in their tossing spray, And all their waves keep grateful holiday. And, smiling on thee through her mountain rains,

Vermont shall bless thee; and the Granite peaks, And vast Katahdin o'er his woods, shall wear Their snow-crowns brighter in the cold keen air;

And Massachusetts, with her rugged cheeks O'errun with grateful tears, shall turn to thee,

When, at thy bidding, the electric wire

Shall tremble northward with its words of fire: Grlory and praise to God! another State is free!

WORSHIP. 89

WORSHIP.

[" Pure religion, and undented, before God and the Father, Is this: To visit the widows and the fatherless in their affliction, End to keep himself unspotted from the world."—James i. 27.J

The Pagan's myths through marble lips are spoken, And ghosts of old Beliefs still flit and moan

Round fane and altar overthrown and broken, O'er tree-grown barrow and gray ring of stone.

Blind Faith had martyrs in those old high planes, The Syrian hill grove and the Druid's wood,

With mothers' offering, to the Fiend's embraces, Bone of their bone, and blood of their own blood.

Red altars, kindling through that night of error,
Smoked with warm blood beneath the cruel eye

Of lawless Power and sanguinary Terror,
Throned on the circle of a pitiless sky;

Beneath whose baleful shadow, overcasting
All heaven above, and blighting earth below,

The scourge grew red, the lip grew pale with fast-
ing,
And man's oblation was his fear and woe!

Then through great temples swelled the dismal moaning

Of dirge-like music and sepulchral prayer; Pale wizard priests, o'er occult symbols droning,

Swung their white censers in the burdened air:

As if the pomp of rituals, and the savor

Of gums and spices could the Unseen One please;

A.S if his ear could bend, with childish favor,
To the poor flattery of the organ keys'

Feet red from war fields trod the church aisles holy
With trembling reverence; and the oppressor
there,
Kneeling before his priest, abased and lowly,
Crushed human hearts beneath his knee of
prayer.

Not such the service the benignant Father
Requireth at his earthly children's hands:

Not the poor offering of vain rites, but rather
The simple duty man from man demands.

For Earth he asks it: the full joy of Heaven
Knoweth no change of waning or increase;

The great heart of the Infinite beats even,
Untroubled flows the river of his peace.

He asks no taper lights, on high surrounding
The priestly altar and the saintly grave,

No dolorous chant nor organ music sounding,
Nor incense clouding up the twilight nave.

For he whom Jesus loved hath truly spoken:
The holier worship which he deigns to bless

Restores the lost, and binds the spirit broken,
And feeds the widow and the fatherless!

Types of our human weakness and our sorrow I
Who lives unhaunted by his loved ones dead?

Who, with vain longing, seeketh not to borrow From stranger eyes the home lights which haro fled?

Oh, brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;

Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there; To worship rightly is to love each other,

Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of Him whose holy work was " doing good;"

THE DEMON OF THE STUDY. 41

80 shall the wide earth seem our Father's temple, Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.

Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangor
Of wild war music o'er the earth shall cease;

Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,
And in its ashes plant the tree of peace!

THE DEMON OF THE STUDY.

The Brownie sits in the Scotchman's room,
And eats his meat and drinks his ale,

And beats the maid with her unused broom,
And the lazy lout with his idle flail,

But he sweeps the floor and threshes the corn,

And hies him away ere the break of dawn.

The shade of Denmark fled from the sun,

And the Cocklane ghost from the barnloft cheer,

The fiend of Faust was a faithful one,
Agrippa's demon wrought in fear,

And the devil of Martin Luther sat

By the stout monk's side in social chat.

The Old Man of the Sea, on the neck of him

Who seven times crossed the deep,
Twined closely each lean and withered limb,

Like the nightmare in one's sleep.
But he drank of the wine, and Sinbad cast
The evil weight from his back at last.

But the demon that cometh day by day
To my quiet room and fireside nook,

Where the casement light falls dim and gray
On faded painting and ancient book,

Is a sorrier one than any whose names

Are chronicled well by good king James.