The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 4 | Page 9

flowers that skirt the eternal frost!?Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest!?Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!?Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!?Ye signs and wonders of the elements!?Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise!
Thou, too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks,?Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard,?Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene,?Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast,--?Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou?That, as I raise my head, awhile bowed low?In adoration, upward from thy base?Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears,?Solemnly seemest, like a vapory cloud,?To rise before me,--Rise, O, ever rise!?Rise, like a cloud of incense from the Earth!?Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills,?Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven,?Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,?And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,?Earth with her thousand voices, praises God.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

THE HILLS OF THE LORD.
God ploughed one day with an earthquake,?And drove his furrows deep!?The huddling plains upstarted.?The hills were all a-leap!
But that is the mountains' secret,?Age-hidden in their breast;?"God's peace is everlasting,"?Are the dream-words of their rest.
He hath made them the haunt of beauty,?The home elect of his grace;?He spreadeth his mornings on them,?His sunsets light their face.
His thunders tread in music?Of footfalls echoing long,?And carry majestic greeting?Around the silent throng.
His winds bring messages to them,?Wild storm-news from the main;?They sing it down to the valleys?In the love-song of the rain.
Green tribes from far come trooping,?And over the uplands flock;?He weaveth the zones together?In robes for his risen rock.
They are nurseries for young rivers;?Nests for his flying cloud;?Homesteads for new-born races,?Masterful, free, and proud.
The people of tired cities?Come up to their shrines and pray;?God freshens again within them,?As he passes by all day.
And lo, I have caught their secret,?The beauty deeper than all.?This faith--that life's hard moments,?When the jarring sorrows befall,
Are but God ploughing his mountains;?And the mountains yet shall be?The source of his grace and freshness?And his peace everlasting to me.
WILLIAM CHANNING GANNETT.

SUNRISE.
As on my bed at dawn I mused and prayed,?I saw my lattice prankt upon the wall,?The flaunting leaves and flitting birds withal--?A sunny phantom interlaced with shade;?"Thanks be to Heaven," in happy mood I said,?"What sweeter aid my matins could befall?Than this fair glory from the east hath made??What holy sleights hath God, the Lord of all,?To bid us feel and see! We are not free?To say we see not, for the glory comes?Nightly and daily, like the flowing sea;?His lustre pierces through the midnight glooms,?And at prime hours, behold! he follows me?With golden shadows to my secret rooms."
CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER.

GOD AND MAN.
FROM THE "ESSAY ON MAN," EPISTLES I AND IV.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind?Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind:?His soul, proud science never taught to stray?Far as the solar walk or Milky Way:?Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,?Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heaven;?Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,?Some happier island in the watery waste,?Where slaves once more their native land behold,?No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.?To Be, contents his natural desire;?He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;?But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,?His faithful dog shall bear him company.?Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense,?Weigh thy opinion against Providence:?Call imperfection what thou fancy'st such,--?Say, here he gives too little, there too much;?Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust,?Yet cry, If man's unhappy, God's unjust,--?If man alone engross not Heaven's high care,?Alone made perfect here, immortal there;?Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,?Re-judge his justice, be the god of God.?In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;?All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.?Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes:?Men would be angels, angels would be gods.?Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,?Aspiring to be angels, men rebel;?And who but wishes to invert the laws?Of Order, sins against the Eternal Cause.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,?Whose body Nature is, and God the soul:?That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;?Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame;?Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,?Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,?Lives through all life, extends through all extent,?Spreads undivided, operates unspent:?Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,?As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;?As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,?As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:?To him no high, no low, no great, no small;?He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.?Cease then, nor order imperfection name:?Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.?Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree?Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.?Submit.--In this or any other sphere,?Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear;?Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,?Or in the