The botanical filicide dead on the spot; It had blown, but he reaped not his horrible gains, For it blew with such force as to blow out his brains, And the crime was blown also, because on the wad, Which was paper, was writ ‘Visitation of God,’ As well as a thrilling account of the deed Which the coroner kindly allowed me toread. “Well, my friend took this story up just, to be sure, As one might a poor foundling that’s laid at one’s door; She combed it and washed it and clothed it and fed it, And as if ’twere her own child most tenderly bred it, Laid the scene (of the legend, I mean) far away a- Mong the green vales underneath Himalaya, And by artist-like touches, laid on here and there, Made the whole thing so touching, I frankly declare I have read it all thrice, and, perhaps I am weak, But I found every time there were tears on my cheek. “The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls, But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles, And folks with a mission that nobody knows, Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose; She can fill up the _carets_ in such, make their scope Converge to some focus of rational hope, And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall Can transmute into honey,--but this is not all; Not only for those she has solace, O say, Vice’s desperate nursling adrift in Broadway, Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human, To the last slender spar from the wreck of the woman, Hast thou not found one shore where those tired drooping feet Can reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beat The soothed head in silence reposing could hear The chimes of far childhood throb back on the ear? Ah, there’s many a beam from the fountain of day That, to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way, Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide ope To the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope; Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dares to go in To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin, And to bring into each, or to find there, some line Of the never completely out-trampled divine; If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then, ’Tis but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen, As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain; What a wealth would it bring to the narrow and sour Could they be as a Child but for one little hour!