Smooth sails the ship of either realm, Kaiser and Jesuit at the helm; We look down the depths, and mark 75 Silent workers in the dark Building slow the sharp-tusked reefs, Old instincts hardening to new beliefs; Patience a little; learn to wait; Hours are long on the clock of Fate. 80 Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and, Atropos, sever! Darkness is strong, and so is Sin, But only God endures forever! THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY. "Come forth!" my catbird calls to me, "And hear me sing a cavatina That, in this old familiar tree, Shall hang a garden of Alcina. "These buttercups shall brim with wine 5 Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic; May not New England be divine? My ode to ripening summer classic? "Or, if to me you will not hark, By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing 10 Till all the alder-coverts dark Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing. "Come out beneath the unmastered sky, With its emancipating spaces, And learn to sing as well as I, 15 Without premeditated graces. "What boot your many-volumed gains, Those withered leaves forever turning, To win, at best, for all your pains, A nature mummy-wrapt in learning? 20 "The leaves wherein true wisdom lies On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies, Grew not so beautiful by thinking. "Come out! with me the oriole cries, 25 Escape the demon that pursues you! And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise, Still hiding, farther onward wooes you." "Alas, dear friend, that, all my days, Has poured from thy syringa thicket 30 The quaintly discontinuous lays To which I hold a season-ticket,-- "A season-ticket cheaply bought With a dessert of pilfered berries, And who so oft my soul has caught 35 With morn and evening voluntaries,-- "Deem me not faithless, if all day Among my dusty books I linger, No pipe, like thee, for June to play With fancy-led, half-conscious finger. 40 "A bird is singing in my brain And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies, Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances. "I ask no ampler skies than those 45 His magic music rears above me, No falser friends, no truer foes,-- And does not Dona Clara love me?