And laid her in a stately room, where fell The shadow of a marble Muse of yore,-- The rose-crowned queen of legendary lore, Polymnia,--full on her death-bed. ’Twas well! The fret and misery of our northern towns, In this her life’s last day, our poor, our pain, Our jangle of false wits, our climate’s frowns, Do for this radiant Greek-souled artist cease: Sole object of her dying eyes remain The beauty and the glorious art of Greece. III. Sprung from the blood of Israel’s scattered race, At a mean inn in German Aarau born, To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn, Tricked out with a Parisian speech and face, Imparting life renewed, old classic grace; Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn, A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn, While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place,-- Ah! not the radiant spirit of Greece alone She had--one power, which made her breast its home. In her, like us, there clashed, contending powers, Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome. The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours; Her genius and her glory are her own. _WORLDLY PLACE._ _Even in a palace, life may be led well!_ So spake the imperial sage, purest of men, Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell, Our freedom for a little bread we sell, And drudge under some foolish master’s ken Who rates us if we peer outside our pen,-- Matched with a palace, is not this a hell? _Even in a palace!_ On his truth sincere, Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came; And when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win, I’ll stop, and say, “There were no succor here! The aids to noble life are all within.” _EAST LONDON._ ’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. I met a preacher there I knew, and said,-- “Ill and o’erworked, how fare you in this scene?” “Bravely!” said he; “for I of late have been Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, _the living bread_.” O human soul! as long as thou canst so Set up a mark of everlasting light, Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow, To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,-- Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night! Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home. _WEST LONDON._ Crouched on the pavement, close by Belgrave Square, A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied; A babe was in her arms, and at her side A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.