So spake Esaias: so, in words of flame, Tekoa's prophet-herdsman smote with blame The traffickers in men, and put to shame, All earth and heaven before, The sacerdotal robbers of the poor. All the dread Scripture lives for thee again, To smite like lightning on the hands profane Lifted to bless the slave-whip and the chain. Once more the old Hebrew tongue Bends with the shafts of God a bow new-strung! Take up the mantle which the prophets wore; Warn with their warnings, show the Christ once more Bound, scourged, and crucified in His blameless poor; And shake above our land The unquenched bolts that blazed in Hosea's hand! Not vainly shalt thou cast upon our years The solemn burdens of the Orient seers, And smite with truth a guilty nation's ears. Mightier was Luther's word Than Seckingen's mailed arm or Hutton's sword! 1858. TO JAMES T. FIELDS ON A BLANK LEAF OF "POEMS PRINTED, NOT PUBLISHED." Well thought! who would not rather hear The songs to Love and Friendship sung Than those which move the stranger's tongue, And feed his unselected ear? Our social joys are more than fame; Life withers in the public look. Why mount the pillory of a book, Or barter comfort for a name? Who in a house of glass would dwell, With curious eyes at every pane? To ring him in and out again, Who wants the public crier's bell? To see the angel in one's way, Who wants to play the ass's part,-- Bear on his back the wizard Art, And in his service speak or bray? And who his manly locks would shave, And quench the eyes of common sense, To share the noisy recompense That mocked the shorn and blinded slave? The heart has needs beyond the head, And, starving in the plenitude Of strange gifts, craves its common food,-- Our human nature's daily bread. We are but men: no gods are we, To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak, Each separate, on his painful peak, Thin-cloaked in self-complacency. Better his lot whose axe is swung In Wartburg woods, or that poor girl's Who by the him her spindle whirls And sings the songs that Luther sung, Than his who, old, and cold, and vain, At Weimar sat, a demigod, And bowed with Jove's imperial nod His votaries in and out again! Ply, Vanity, thy winged feet! Ambition, hew thy rocky stair! Who envies him who feeds on air The icy splendor of his seat? I see your Alps, above me, cut The dark, cold sky; and dim and lone I see ye sitting,--stone on stone,-- With human senses dulled and shut. I could not reach you, if I would, Nor sit among your cloudy shapes; And (spare the fable of the grapes And fox) I would not if I could. Keep to your lofty pedestals! The safer plain below I choose Who never wins can rarely lose, Who never climbs as rarely falls. Let such as love the eagle's scream Divide with him his home of ice For me shall gentler notes suffice,-- The valley-song of bird and stream; The pastoral bleat, the drone of bees, The flail-beat chiming far away, The cattle-low, at shut of day, The voice of God in leaf and breeze;