Where is the Hebrew's fatherland? The folk of Christ is sore bestead; The Son of Man is bruised and banned, Nor finds whereon to lay his head. His cup is gall, his meat is tears, His passion lasts a thousand years. Each crime that wakes in man the beast, Is visited upon his kind. The lust of mobs, the greed of priest, The tyranny of kings, combined To root his seed from earth again, His record is one cry of pain. When the long roll of Christian guilt Against his sires and kin is known, The flood of tears, the life-blood spilt The agony of ages shown, What oceans can the stain remove, From Christian law and Christian love? Nay, close the book; not now, not here, The hideous tale of sin narrate, Reechoing in the martyr's ear, Even he might nurse revengeful hate, Even he might turn in wrath sublime, With blood for blood and crime for crime. Coward? Not he, who faces death, Who singly against worlds has fought, For what? A name he may not breathe, For liberty of prayer and thought. The angry sword he will not whet, His nobler task is--to forget. IN EXILE. "Since that day till now our life is one unbroken paradise. We live a true brotherly life. Every evening after supper we take a seat under the mighty oak and sing our songs."--Extract from a letter of a Russian refugee in Texas. Twilight is here, soft breezes bow the grass, Day's sounds of various toil break slowly off, The yoke-freed oxen low, the patient ass Dips his dry nostril in the cool, deep trough. Up from the prairie the tanned herdsmen pass With frothy pails, guiding with voices rough Their udder-lightened kine. Fresh smells of earth, The rich, black furrows of the glebe send forth. After the Southern day of heavy toil, How good to lie, with limbs relaxed, brows bare To evening's fan, and watch the smoke-wreaths coil Up from one's pipe-stem through the rayless air. So deem these unused tillers of the soil, Who stretched beneath the shadowing oak tree, stare Peacefully on the star-unfolding skies, And name their life unbroken paradise. The hounded stag that has escaped the pack, And pants at ease within a thick-leaved dell; The unimprisoned bird that finds the track Through sun-bathed space, to where his fellows dwell; The martyr, granted respite from the rack, The death-doomed victim pardoned from his cell,-- Such only know the joy these exiles gain,-- Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.