2. To a Friend.

WHO prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my

mind?

He much, the old man, who, clearest-soul'd of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,5
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won, That halting slave, who in Nicopolis

Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son

Clear'd Rome of what most shamed him. But be his

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,

Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.

ON SEEING GEORGE CRUIKSHANK'S PICTURE OF THE BOTTLE,' IN THE COUNTRY.

ARTIST! whose hand, with horror wing'd, hath torn

From the rank life of towns this leaf; and flung

The prodigy of full-blown crime among
Valleys and men to middle fortune born,

Not innocent, indeed, yet not forlorn;

Say, what shall calm us, when such guests intrude, Like comets on the heavenly solitude?

Shall breathless glades cheer'd by shy Dian's horn,

Cold-bubbling springs, or caves?-Not so! The soul Breasts her own griefs; and, urged too fiercely, says: 'Why tremble? True, the nobleness of man

May be by man effaced; man can control

To pain, to death, the bent of his own days.
Know thou the worst! So much, not more, he can.'

4. To a Republican Friend, 1848.

OD knows it, I am with you! If to prize

GOD

Those virtues, prized and practised by too few,

But prized, but loved, but eminent in you,
Man's fundamental life; if to despise

The barren optimistic sophistries

Of comfortable moles, whom what they do
Teaches the limit of the just and true
(And for such doing they require no eyes);

If sadness at the long heart-wasting show
Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted;
If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow

The armies of the homeless and unfed-
If these are yours, if this is what you are,
Then am I yours, and what you feel, I share.

5. Continued.

ET, when I muse on what life is, I seem

YET,

Rather to patience prompted, than that proud Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loudFrance, famed in all great arts, in none supreme!

Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream,
Is on all sides o'ershadow'd by the high
Uno'erleap'd mountains of necessity,

Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

Nor will that day dawn at a human nod,
When, bursting through the network superposed
By selfish occupation-plot and plan,

Lust, avarice, envy-liberated man,

All difference with his fellow-mortal closed,
Shall be left standing face to face with God.

6. East London.

'TWAS August, and the fierce sun overhead

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

I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 'Ill and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene?' 'Bravely!' said he; for I of late have been

Much cheer'd 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 labourest through the night!
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.