Sunbeams watched their play,
With a flickering light and shade
Through the screen the alders made.

Broader grew the flowing river

To its grassy brink;

Slowly, in the slanting sun-rays,
Cattle trooped to drink;
The blue sky, I think,

Was no bluer than that stream,
Slipping onward like a dream.

Quicker, deeper then it hurried,
Rustling fierce and free;

But I said, " It should grow calmer
Ere it meet the sea,-

The wide purple sca,

Which I weary for in vain,

Wasting all my toil and pain."

But it rushed still quicker, fiercer,

In its rocky bed;

Hard and stony was the pathway

To my tired tread;

"I despair," I said,

"Of that wide and glorious sca

That was promised unto me."

K

DISCOURAGED.

So I turned aside, and wandered
Through green meadows near,
Far away, among the daisies,-
Far away, for fear

Lest I still should hear
The loud murmur of its song,

As the river flowed along.

Now I hear it not:-I loiter

Gaily as before;

Yet I sometimes think,-and thinking

Makes my heart so sore!

"Just a few steps more,

And there might have shone for me,

Blue and infinite, the sea!"

149

PROCTER.

THE FUTURE.

A WANDERER is a man from his birth.

He was born in a ship

On the breast of the river of Time;
Brimming with wonder and joy

He spreads out his arms to the light,

Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. Whether he wakes

Where the snowy mountainous pass,

Echoing the screams of the eagles,
Hems in its gorges the bed

Of the new-born, clear-flowing stream;
Whether he first sees light

Where the river in gleaming rings
Sluggishly winds through the plain;
Whether in sound of the swallowing sea-
As is the world on the banks,

So is the mind of the man.

Vainly does each, as he glides,

Fable and dream.

Of the lands which the river of Time

Had left ere he woke on its breast,

Or shall reach when his eyes shall be closed.
Only the tract where he sails

He wots of; only the thoughts

Raised by the objects he passes, are his.

Who can see the green earth any more
As she was by the sources of Time?
Who imagines her fields as they lay
In the sunshine, unworn by the plough?
Who thinks as they thought,

The tribes who then roam'd on her breast,
Her vigorous primitive sons?

What girl

Now reads in her bosom as clear
As Rebekah read, when she sate

At eve by the palm-shaded well?
Who guards in her breast

As deep, as pellucid a spring
Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?

What bard,

At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul,
With a plainness as near,

As flashing, as Moses felt,

When he lay in the night by his flock

On the starlit Arabian waste?

Can rise and obey

The beck of the spirit like him?

This tract which the river of Time
Now flows through with us, is the plain.
Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.
Border'd by cities, and hoarse

With a thousand cries, is its stream;

And we on its breast, our minds

Are confused as the cries which we hear,
Changing and short as the sights which we see.

And we say that repose has fled

For ever the course of the river of Time;

That cities will crowd to its edge

In a blacker, incessanter line;

That the din will be more on its banks,

Denser the trade on its stream,

Flatter the plain where it flows,

Fiercer the sun overhead.

That never will those on its breast
See an ennobling sight,

Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed.