And when the Boaz Winter throws his skirt Of purest white across the lap of Earth, And decks her bare arborial hair with gems, Whose feeblest flash would pale the Koh-i-noor, The rich, alone, find beauty in the scene, And, clad in thankless comfort, brave the cold. The gliding steels flash through the feathery drifts, The jingling bells proclaiming happiness; Yet ’neath the furry robe the oath is heard, And boisterous laughter at the ribald jest. The coldest hearts beat ’neath the warmest clothes; And often all the blessings wealth can give, Are heaped on one, whose daily life reviles The very name of Him who doth bestow. While in a freezing garret, o’er the coals That, bluely flickering with the feeble flame, Seem cold themselves, a trusting Christian bends; Her faith all mocked by cruel circumstance. The cold, bare walls, the chilling air-swept floor; Some broken stools, a mattress stuffed with straw, Upholstering the apartment. Through the sash, The wind, with jaggèd lips of broken glass, Shrieks in its freezing spite. A cold-blued babe, With face too thin to hold a dimple’s print, With famished gums tugs at the arid breast, Thrusting its bare, splotched arms, in eagerness, From out the poor white blanket’s ravelled edge. Beside the mother sits a little boy, With one red frost-cracked hand spread out, in vain, To warm above the faintly-burning coals; The other pressing hardly ’gainst his teeth A stale and tasteless loaf of smallest size, Which lifting often to the mother’s view, He offers part; she only shakes her head, And sadly smiles upon the gaunt young face. Yet in her basket, on a pile of work, An open Bible lies with outstretched leaves, Whose verses speak in keenest irony: “Do good,” and “verily thou shalt be fed.” And so through all the world, the righteous poor, The wicked rich. Deceit, and fraud, and craft Reap large rewards, while pure integrity Must gnaw the bone of faith with here and there A speck of flesh called consciousness of right, To reach the marrow in another world. But man within himself’s the greatest paradox; “A little animal,” as Voltaire says, And yet a greater wonder than the sun, Or spangled firmament. That little one Can weigh and measure all the wheeling worlds, But finds within his “five feet” home, a Sphinx Whose riddle he can never solve. “Thyself,” The oracles of old bade men to know, As if to mock their very impotence; And man, to know himself, for centuries Has toiled and studied deep, in vain.-- Not man in flesh, for blest Hippocrates Bright trimmed his lamp, and passed it down the line, And each disciple adding of his oil, It blazes now above the ghastly corpse, Till every fibre, every thread-like vein,