Yet, when I sent my love to thee,

Thou with a smile didst take it in,

And entertain❜dst it royally,

Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin, And leprous with the taint of sin.

Now every day thy love I meet,

As o'er the earth it wanders wide,
With weary step and bleeding feet,
Still knocking at the heart of pride
And offering grace, though still denied.

EXTREME UNCTION.

Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be
Alone with the consoler, Death;

Far sadder eyes than thine will see

This crumbling clay yield up its breath; These shrivelled hands have deeper stains

Than holy oil can cleanse away,

Hands that have plucked the world's coarse gains As erst they plucked the flowers of May.

Call, if thou canst, to those gray eyes

Some faith from youth's traditions wrung;

This fruitless husk which dustward dries

Has been a heart once, has been young;

On this bowed head the awful Past

Once laid its consecrating hands;

The Future in its purpose vast

Paused, waiting my supreme commands.

But look! whose shadows block the door?
Who are those two that stand aloof?
See on my hands this freshening gore
Writes o'er again its crimson proof!

My looked-for death-bed guests are met;

There my dead Youth doth wring its hands, And there, with eyes that goad me yet,

The ghost of my Ideal stands !

God bends from out the deep and says, "I gave thee the great gift of life;

Wast thou not called in many ways?

I

Are not my earth and heaven at strife?

gave thee of my seed to sow,

Bringest thou me my hundred-fold?

Can I look up with face aglow,

And answer, "Father, here is gold ” ?

I have been innocent; God knows

When first this wasted life began,

Not grape with grape more kindly grows, every brother-man :

Than I with

Now here I gasp; what lose my kind,

When this fast-ebbing breath shall part?

What bands of love and service bind

This being to the world's sad heart?

Christ still was wandering o'er the earth
Without a place to lay his head;
He found free welcome at my hearth,

bread:

He shared my cup and brake my Now, when I hear those steps sublime,

That bring the other world to this,

My snake-turned nature, sunk in slime,
Starts sideway with defiant hiss.

Upon the hour when I was born,
God said, "Another man shall be,"
And the great Maker did not scorn

Out of himself to fashion me;

He sunned me with his ripening looks,

And Heaven's rich instincts in me grew,

As effortless as woodland nooks

Send violets up and paint them blue.

Yes, I who now, with angry tears,

Am exiled back to brutish clod,

Have borne unquenched for fourscore years
A spark of the eternal God;

And to what end? How yield I back
The trust for such high uses given ?

Heaven's light hath but revealed a track
Whereby to crawl away from heaven.

Men think it is an awful sight
To see a soul just set adrift

On that drear voyage from whose night
The ominous shadows never lift ;

But 't is more awful to behold

A helpless infant newly born,

Whose little hands unconscious hold

The keys of darkness and of morn.