Him have we seen the greenwood side along, With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun. And in some of the first editions, immediately before "The Epitaph," was the following stanza: There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen, are showers of violets found; Eyes which the preacher could not school, And lips say, "God be pitiful,” Who ne'er said, "God be prais'd." Be pitiful, O God! The tempest stretches from the steep The beasts grow tame, and near us creep, As help were in the human Yet, while the cloud-wheels roll and grind Mrs. Browning. The plague runs festering through the town, - The plague of gold strikes far and near, — This purple chimar which we wear, Makes madder than the centaur's. Our thoughts grow blank, our words grow strange; We cheer the pale gold-diggers— Each soul is worth so much on 'Change, And marked, like sheep, with figures. Be pitiful, O God! The curse of gold upon the land, The lack of bread enforces The rail-cars snort from strand to strand, The poor die mute-with starving gaze On corn-ships in the offing. The happy children come to us, And look up in our faces: They ask us-Was it thus, and thus, We cannot speak: - we see anew And feel our mother's smile press through The kisses she is giving. We sit on hills our childhood wist, The city's golden spire it was, When hope and health were strongest, But now it is the churchyard grass, We look upon the longest. We have no strength for crying: No strength, no need! Then, Soul of mine, Lo! in the depth of God's Divine, The Son adjures the Father OH! WHY SHOULD THE SPIRIT OF MORTAL BE PROUD? Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, And the young and the old, and the low and the high The infant a mother attended and loved; The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye, - And the memory of those who loved her and praised, The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne; The eye of the sage and the heart of the brave, The peasant, whose lot was to sow and to reap; The herdsman, who climbed with his goats up the steep; The saint who enjoyed the communion of heaven, So the multitude goes, like the flower or the weed For we are the same our fathers have been: The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think; To the life we are clinging they also would cling: They loved, but the story we cannot unfold; They scorned, but the heart of the haughty is cold; They died, aye! they died; we things that are now, Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage road. Yea! hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, 'Tis the wink of the eye, 'tis the draught of a breath. |