Among the stars distinguish and with joy Rest on that God-fed Pharos of the north, On some blue promontory of heaven lighted That juts far out into the upper sea;

To this one hope my heart hath clung for years,

As would a foundling to the talisman Hung round his neck by hands he knew not whose;

119

A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside,
Yet he therein can feel a virtue left
By the sad pressure of a mother's hand,
And unto him it still is tremulous
With palpitating haste and wet with tears,
The key to him of hope and humanness,
The coarse shell of life's pearl, Expectancy.
This hope hath been to me for love and
fame,

Hath made me wholly lonely on the earth,
Building me up as in a thick-ribbed tower,
Wherewith enwalled my watching spirit
burned,

Conquering its little island from the Dark, Sole as a scholar's lamp, and heard men's steps,

In the far hurry of the outward world, Pass dimly forth and back, sounds heard in dream.

130

For the cheap means putting Heaven's ends in pawn,

And bartering his bleak rocks, the freehold

stern

Of destiny's first-born, for smoother fields
That yield no crop of self-denying will;
A hand is stretched to him from out the
dark,

Which grasping without question, he is led
Where there is work that he must do for
God.

The trial still is the strength's complement,
And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales 230
The sheer heights of supremest purposes
Is steeper to the angel than the child.
Chances have laws as fixed as planets have,
And disappointment's dry and bitter root,
Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool
Of the world's scorn, are the right mother-
milk

To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind, And break a pathway to those unknown realms

That in the earth's broad shadow lie enthralled;

240

Endurance is the crowning quality,
And patience all the passion of great hearts;
These are their stay, and when the leaden
world

Sets its hard face against their fateful thought,

And brute strength, like the Gaulish conqueror,

Clangs his huge glaive down in the other

1 Lowell's Poems, Second Series, dated 1848, was really published in 1847.

2 Written when the annexation of Texas was being discussed, but universal in its application.

For twenty years the solemn monitory music of this poem never ceased to reëcho in public halls. In the Lowell Memorial Address which George William Curtis delivered before the Brooklyn Institute, February 22, 1892, he said in his heightened way of some passages of 'The Present Crisis: Wendell Phillips winged with their music and tipped with their flame the dart of his fervid appeal and manly scorn. As he quoted them with suppressed emotion in his low, melodious, penetrating voice, the white plume of the resistless Navarre of eloquence gained a loftier grace, that relentless sword of invective a more flashing edge.' And the stanza of The Present Crisis' beginning For humanity sweeps onward' was made by Sumner the text and motif of that famous Crime against Speech' oration that provoked the assault of Preston Brooks. (Greenslet's Lowell, pp. 79, 80.)

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,

Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,

That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea;

Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry

Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly;

Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record

One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

40

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track,

Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how

each generation learned

One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For Humanity sweeps onward: where today the martyr stands,

On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;

Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,

While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return

To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.

70

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires;

Shall we make their creed our jailer?
Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old prophets steal
the funeral lamps away

To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

December, 1844.

A CONTRAST

THY love thou sentest oft to me,
And still as oft I thrust it back;
Thy messengers I could not see

In those who everything did lack,
The poor, the outcast and the black.

90 1845.