EAST LONDON.

T WAS August, and the fierce sun overhead

Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, looked thrice-dispirited;

I met a preacher there I knew, and said,

"Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?"

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Bravely!" said he; "for I of late have been

Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread."

O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,

Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,
Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night!

Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.

6

WEST LONDON.

YROUCHED on the pavement close by Belgrave

CROUCHED

Square

A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;

A babe was in her arms, and at her side

A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.

Some laboring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Passed opposite; she touched her girl, who hied
Across, and begged, and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.

Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.

She turns from that cold succor, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.

L

ANTI-DESPERATION.

ONG fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,

How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare!
Christ, some one says, was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from heaven, our sin to scan;

We live no more, when we have done our span. "Well, then, for Christ," thou answerest, care?

"who can

From sin, which heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes our life without a plan!"

So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
"Hath man no second life? - Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see?

More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us? Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!"

--

IMMORTALITY.

OILED by our fellow-men, depressed, outworn,

FOILED

We leave the brutal world to take its way,

And, Patience! in another life, we say,

The world shall be thrust down, and we upborne!

And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn
The world's poor, routed leavings; or will they,
Who failed under the heat of this life's day,
Support the fervors of the heavenly morn?

No, no! the energy of life may be

Kept on after the grave, but not begun ;
And he who flagged not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing, only he, His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

WORLDLY PLACE.

EVEN in a palace, life may be led well!

So spoke the imperial sage, purest of men,

Of common life, where, crowded up pellmell,

Our freedom for a little bread we sell,
And drudge under some foolish master's ken,
Who rates us, if we peer outside our pen,
Matched with a palace, is not this a hell?

Even in a palace! On his truth sincere,
Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came;
And when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame

Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win,

I'll stop, and say: "There were no succor here! The aids to noble life are all within."