Like bitter accusation ev'n to death, Caught up the whole of love and utter'd it, And bade adieu for ever. Live-yet live Shall sharpest pathos blight us, knowing all Life needs for life is possible to will Live happy; tend thy flowers; be tended by My blessing! Should my Shadow cross thy thoughts Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams, THE GOLDEN YEAR. WELL, you shall have that song which Leonard wrote: Old James was with me: we that day had been To which "They call me what they will," he said: "But I was born too late: the fair new forms, That float about the threshold of an age, Like truths of Science waiting to be caught— Catch me who can, and make the catcher crown'd- Are taken by the forelock. Let it be. But if you care indeed to listen, hear These measured words, my work of yestermorn : "We sleep and wake and sleep, but all things move; The Sun flies forward to his brother Sun; The dark Earth follows wheel'd in her ellipse; Move onward, leading up the golden year. "Ah, tho' the times, when some new thought can bud, Are but as poets' seasons when they flower, Yet seas, that daily gain upon the shore, And slow and sure comes up the golden year. "When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps, But smit with freër light shall slowly melt In many streams to fatten lower lands, And light shall spread, and man be liker man Thro' all the season of the golden year. "Shall eagles not be eagles? wrens be wrens? "But we grow old. Ah! when shall all men's good Be each man's rule, and universal Peace Thus far he flow'd, and ended; whereupon "Ah, folly!" in mimic cadence answer'd JamesAh, folly for it lies so far away, Not in our time, nor in our children's time, With that he struck his staff against the rocks And broke it,-James,-you know him,-old, but full And like an oaken stock in winter woods, Then added, all in heat : "What stuff is this! Old writers push'd the happy season back,— The more fools they,—we forward: dreamers both : You most, that in an age, when every hour Must sweat her sixty minutes to the death, Live on, God love us, as if the seedsman, rapt He spoke; and, high above, I heard them blast The steep slate-quarry, and the great echo flap And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff. |