During these Christian years faith was rewarded with position, wealth and power. Faith was the path to fame and honor. The man who investigated was the enemy, the assassin of souls. The creed was barricaded on every side, above it were the glories of heaven--below were the agonies of hell. The soldiers of the cross were strangers to pity. Only traitors to God were shocked by the murder of an unbeliever. The true Christian was a savage. His virtues were ferocious, and compared with his vices were beneficent. The drunkard was a better citizen than the saint. The libertine and prostitute were far nearer human, nearer moral, than those who pleased God by persecuting their fellows. The man who thought, and expressed his thoughts, died in a dungeon--on the scaffold or in flames. The sincere Christian was insane. His one object was to save his soul. He despised all the pleasures of sense. He believed that his nature was depraved and that his desires were wicked. He fasted and prayed--deserted his wife and children--inflicted tortures on himself and sought by pain endured to gain the crown. * * * LIFE. * Written for Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske, editor of The New York Dramatic Mirror, December 18,1886. BORN of love and hope, of ecstasy and pain, of agony and fear, of tears and joy--dowered with the wealth of two united hearts--held in happy arms, with lips upon life's drifted font, blue-veined and fair, where perfect peace finds perfect form--rocked by willing feet and wooed to shadowy shores of sleep by siren mother singing soft and low--looking with wonder's wide and startled eyes at common things of life and day--taught by want and wish and contact with the things that touch the dimpled flesh of babes--lured by light and flame, and charmed by color's wondrous robes--learning the use of hands and feet, and by the love of mimicry beguiled to utter speech--releasing prisoned thoughts from crabbed and curious marks on soiled and tattered leaves--puzzling the brain with crooked numbers and their changing, tangled worth--and so through years of alternating day and night, until the captive grows familiar with the chains and walls and limitations of a life. And time runs on in sun and shade, until the one of all the world is wooed and won, and all the lore of love is taught and learned again. Again a home is built with the fair chamber wherein faint dreams, like cool and shadowy vales, divide the billowed hours of love. Again the miracle of a birth--the pain and joy, the kiss of welcome and the cradle-song drowning the drowsy prattle of a babe. And then the sense of obligation and of wrong--pity for those who toil and weep--tears for the imprisoned and despised--love for the generous dead, and in the heart the rapture of a high resolve.