OUR ORDERS.

Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
To deck our girls for gay delights!
The crimson flower of battle blooms,
And solemn marches fill the nights.
Weave but the flag whose bars to-day
Drooped heavy o'er our early dead,
And homely garments, coarse and gray,
For orphans that must earn their bread.
Keep back your tunes, ye viols sweet,
That poured delight from other lands!
Rouse there the dancers' restless feet:
The trumpet leads our warrior bands.
And ye that wage the war of words
With mystic fame and subtle power,
Go, chatter to the idle birds,

Or teach the lesson of the hour!

Ye Sibyl Arts, in one stern knot
Be all your offices combined!
Stand close while Courage draws the lot,
The destiny of human kind.

And if that destiny could fail,

The sun should darken in the sky,

The eternal bloom of Nature pale,

And God, and Truth, and Freedom die.

JULIA WARD HOWE.

O Beautiful! my Country! Ours once more!
Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair
O'er such sweet brows as never other wore,
And letting thy set lips,

Freed from wrath's pale eclipse,

The rosy edges of their smile lay bare;

What words divine of lover or of poet
Could tell our love and make thee know it,
Among the Nations bright beyond compare!
What were our lives without thee?

What all our lives to save thee?
We reck not what we gave thee;
We will not dare to doubt thee,

But ask whatever else, and we will dare!
Commemoration Ode.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible, swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circ

ling camps;

They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps :

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:

As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace

shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never

call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men

free,

While God is marching on.

JULIA WARD HOWE.

The man who idly sits and thinks

May sow a nobler crop than corn;

For thoughts are seeds of future deeds,

And when God thought the world was born.

GEORGE JOHN ROMANES.

Once slept the world an egg of stone,

And pulse, and sound, and light was none;

And God said, "Throb!" and there was motion,
And the vast mass became vast ocean.

Woodnotes.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

Thought is deeper than all speech,
Feeling deeper than all thought;

Souls to souls can never teach
What unto themselves was taught.

CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH.

Then bless thy secret growth; nor catch
At noise; but thrive unseen and dumb.

HENRY VAUGHAN.

There is an inmost centre in us all,

Where truth abides in fulness;

and to KNOW

Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.

Paracelsus.

ROBERT BROWNING.

XII.

The Faith that Strengthens.

'Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay,
But the high faith that failed not by the way.

Commemoration Ode.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.