Come, Poet, come! In vain I seem to call. And yet Think not the living times forget. Ages of heroes fought and fell That Homer in the end might tell; O’er grovelling generations past Upstood the Doric fane at last; And countless hearts on countless years Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears, Rude laughter and unmeaning tears; Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome The pure perfection of her dome. Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see; Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown, The dead forgotten and unknown. _THE DREAM LAND._ I To think that men of former days In naked truth deserved the praise Which, fain to have in flesh and blood An image of imagined good, Poets have sung and men received, And all too glad to be deceived, Most plastic and most inexact, Posterity has told for fact;— To say what was, was not as we, This also is a vanity. II Ere Agamemnon, warriors were, Ere Helen, beauties equalling her, Brave ones and fair, whom no one knows, And brave or fair as these or those. The commonplace whom daily we In our dull streets and houses see, To think of other mould than these Were Cato, Solon, Socrates, Or Mahomet or Confutze, This also is a vanity. III Hannibal, Cæsar, Charlemain, And he before, who back on Spain Repelled the fierce inundant Moor; Godfrey, St. Louis, wise and pure, Washington, Cromwell, John, and Paul, Columbus, Luther, one and all, Go mix them up, the false and true, With Sindbad, Crusoe, or St. Preux, And say as he was, so was he, This also is a vanity. IV Say not: Behold it here or there, Or on the earth, or in the air. That better thing than can be seen Is neither now nor e’er has been; It is not in this land or that, But in a place we soon are at, Where all can seek and some can find, Where hope is liberal, fancy kind, And what we wish for we can see, Which also is a vanity. _IN THE DEPTHS._ It is not sweet content, be sure, That moves the nobler Muse to song, Yet when could truth come whole and pure From hearts that inly writhe with wrong? ’Tis not the calm and peaceful breast That sees or reads the problem true; They only know on whom ’t has prest Too hard to hope to solve it too. Our ills are worse than at their ease These blameless happy souls suspect, They only study the disease, Alas, who live not to detect. _DARKNESS._ But that from slow dissolving pomps of dawn No verity of slowly strengthening light Early or late hath issued; that the day Scarce-shown, relapses rather, self-withdrawn, Back to the glooms of ante-natal night, For this, O human beings, mourn we may. _TWO MOODS._