Personal Poems II, vol 4, part 2 | Page 3

over Europe, and visited most of its sovereigns, to plead
against the slave-trade and slavery; and had twice before made visits to
this country, under impressions of religious duty. He was the father of
the Right Hon. William Edward Forster. He visited my father's house in
Haverhill during his first tour in the United States.
The years are many since his hand
Was laid upon my head,
Too
weak and young to understand
The serious words he said.
Yet often now the good man's look
Before me seems to swim,
As if

some inward feeling took
The outward guise of him.
As if, in passion's heated war,
Or near temptation's charm,
Through
him the low-voiced monitor
Forewarned me of the harm.
Stranger and pilgrim! from that day
Of meeting, first and last,

Wherever Duty's pathway lay,
His reverent steps have passed.
The poor to feed, the lost to seek,
To proffer life to death,
Hope to
the erring,--to the weak
The strength of his own faith.
To plead the captive's right; remove
The sting of hate from Law;

And soften in the fire of love
The hardened steel of War.
He walked the dark world, in the mild,
Still guidance of the Light;

In tearful tenderness a child,
A strong man in the right.
From what great perils, on his way,
He found, in prayer, release;

Through what abysmal shadows lay
His pathway unto peace,
God knoweth : we could only see
The tranquil strength he gained;

The bondage lost in liberty,
The fear in love unfeigned.
And I,--my youthful fancies grown
The habit of the man,
Whose
field of life by angels sown
The wilding vines o'erran,--
Low bowed in silent gratitude,
My manhood's heart enjoys
That
reverence for the pure and good
Which blessed the dreaming boy's.
Still shines the light of holy lives
Like star-beams over doubt;
Each
sainted memory, Christlike, drives
Some dark possession out.
O friend! O brother I not in vain
Thy life so calm and true,
The
silver dropping of the rain,
The fall of summer dew!
How many burdened hearts have prayed
Their lives like thine might

be
But more shall pray henceforth for aid
To lay them down like
thee.
With weary hand, yet steadfast will,
In old age as in youth,
Thy
Master found thee sowing still
The good seed of His truth.
As on thy task-field closed the day
In golden-skied decline,
His
angel met thee on the way,
And lent his arm to thine.
Thy latest care for man,--thy last
Of earthly thought a prayer,--
Oh,
who thy mantle, backward cast,
Is worthy now to wear?
Methinks the mound which marks thy bed
Might bless our land and
save,
As rose, of old, to life the dead
Who touched the prophet's
grave
1854.
TO CHARLES SUMNER.
If I have seemed more prompt to censure wrong
Than praise the right;
if seldom to thine ear
My voice hath mingled with the exultant cheer

Borne upon all our Northern winds along;
If I have failed to join
the fickle throng
In wide-eyed wonder, that thou standest strong
In
victory, surprised in thee to find
Brougham's scathing power with
Canning's grace combined;
That he, for whom the ninefold Muses
sang,
From their twined arms a giant athlete sprang,
Barbing the
arrows of his native tongue
With the spent shafts Latona's archer
flung,
To smite the Python of our land and time,
Fell as the monster
born of Crissa's slime,
Like the blind bard who in Castalian springs

Tempered the steel that clove the crest of kings,
And on the shrine of
England's freedom laid
The gifts of Cumve and of Delphi's' shade,--

Small need hast thou of words of praise from me.
Thou knowest
my heart, dear friend, and well canst guess
That, even though silent, I
have not the less
Rejoiced to see thy actual life agree
With the large
future which I shaped for thee,

When, years ago, beside the summer

sea,
White in the moon, we saw the long waves fall
Baffled and
broken from the rocky wall,
That, to the menace of the brawling flood,

Opposed alone its massive quietude,
Calm as a fate; with not a leaf
nor vine
Nor birch-spray trembling in the still moonshine,

Crowning it like God's peace. I sometimes think
That night-scene by
the sea prophetical,
(For Nature speaks in symbols and in signs,

And through her pictures human fate divines),
That rock, wherefrom
we saw the billows sink
In murmuring rout, uprising clear and tall

In the white light of heaven, the type of one
Who, momently by
Error's host assailed,
Stands strong as Truth, in greaves of granite
mailed;
And, tranquil-fronted, listening over all
The tumult, hears
the angels say, Well done!
1854.
BURNS
ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF HEATHER IN BLOSSOM.
No more these simple flowers belong
To Scottish maid and lover;

Sown in the common soil of song,
They bloom the wide world over.
In smiles and tears, in sun and showers,
The minstrel and the heather,

The deathless singer and the flowers
He sang of live together.
Wild heather-bells and Robert Burns
The moorland flower and
peasant!
How, at their mention, memory turns
Her pages old and
pleasant!
The gray sky wears again its gold
And purple of adorning,
And
manhood's noonday shadows hold
The dews of boyhood's morning.
The dews that washed the dust and soil
From off the wings of
pleasure,
The sky, that flecked the, ground of