Through vine-wreathed cups with wine once red, The lights on brimming crystal fell, Drawn, sparkling, from the rivulet head And mossy well. Through prison walls, like Heaven-sent hope, Fresh breezes blew, and sunbeams strayed, And with the idle gallows-rope The young child played. Where the doomed victim in his cell Had counted o'er the weary hours, Glad school-girls, answering to the bell, Came crowned with flowers. Grown wiser for the lesson given, I fear no longer, for I know That, where the share is deepest driven, The best fruits grow. The outworn rite, the old abuse, The pious fraud transparent grown, The good held captive in the use Of wrong alone,-- These wait their doom, from that great law Which makes the past time serve to-day; And fresher life the world shall draw From their decay. Oh, backward-looking son of time! The new is old, the old is new, The cycle of a change sublime Still sweeping through. So wisely taught the Indian seer; Destroying Seva, forming Brahm, Who wake by turns Earth's love and fear, Are one, the same. Idly as thou, in that old day Thou mournest, did thy sire repine; So, in his time, thy child grown gray Shall sigh for thine. But life shall on and upward go; Th' eternal step of Progress beats To that great anthem, calm and slow, Which God repeats. Take heart! the Waster builds again, A charmed life old Goodness bath; The tares may perish, but the grain Is not for death. God works in all things; all obey His first propulsion from the night Wake thou and watch! the world is gray With morning light! 1848. THE PEACE CONVENTION AT BRUSSELS. STILL in thy streets, O Paris! doth the stain Of blood defy the cleansing autumn rain; Still breaks the smoke Messina's ruins through, And Naples mourns that new Bartholomew, When squalid beggary, for a dole of bread, At a crowned murderer's beck of license, fed The yawning trenches with her noble dead; Still, doomed Vienna, through thy stately halls The shell goes crashing and the red shot falls, And, leagued to crush thee, on the Danube's side, The bearded Croat and Bosniak spearman ride; Still in that vale where Himalaya's snow Melts round the cornfields and the vines below, The Sikh's hot cannon, answering ball for ball, Flames in the breach of Moultan's shattered wall; On Chenab's side the vulture seeks the slain, And Sutlej paints with blood its banks again.