THE QUAKER ALUMNI.

And the vanishing town behind him search
For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church •
And feel for one moment the ghosts of trade,
And fashion, and folly, and pleasure laid,
By the thought of that life of pure intent,
That voice of warning yet eloquent,
Of one on the errands of angels sent.
And if where he labored the flood of sin
Like a tide from the harbor-bar sets in,
And over a life of time and sense
The church-spires lift their vain defence,
As if to scatter the bolts of God
With the points of Calvin's thunder-rod,—
Still, as the gem of its civic crown,
Precious beyond the world's renown,
His memory hallows the ancient town!

897

THE QUAKER ALUMNI,30

FROM the well-springs of Hudson, the sea-cliffs of Maine,

Grave men, sober matrons, you gather again; And, with hearts warmer grown as your heads grow more cool,

Play over the old game of going to school.

All your strifes and vexations, your whims and complaints,

(You were not saints yourselves, if the children of saints!)

All your petty self-seekings and rivalries done, Round the dear Alina Mater your hearts beat as one!

How widely soe'er you have strayed from the fold, Though your "thee" has grown "you," and your drab blue and gold,

To the old friendly speech and the garb's sober form,

Like the heart of Argyle to the tartan, you warm.

But, the first greetings over, you glance round the hall;

Your hearts call the roll, but they answer not all: Through the turf green above them the dead cannot hear;

Name by name, in the silence, falls sad as a tear!

In love, let us trust, they were summoned so soon From the morning of life, while we toil through its

noon;

They were frail like ourselves, they had needs like

our own,

And they rest as we rest in God's mercy alone.

Unchanged by our changes of spirit and frame, Past, now, and henceforward the Lord is the same; Though we sink in the darkness, his arms break our fall,

And in death as in life he is Father of all!

We e are older: our footsteps, so light in the play Of the far-away school-time, move slower to-day ;Here a beard touched with frost, there a bald, shining crown,

And beneath the cap's border gray mingles with

brown.

But faith should be cheerful, and trust should be

glad,

And our follies and sins, not our years, make us

sad.

Should the heart closer shut as the bonnet grows

prim,

And the face grow in length as the hat grows in brim?

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399

Life is brief, duty grave; but, with rain-folded

wings,

Of yesterday's sunshine the grateful heart sings; And we, of all others, have reason to pay

The tribute of thanks, and rejoice on our way,

For the counsels that turned from the follies of youth;

For the beauty of patience, the whiteness of truth; For the wounds of rebuke, when love tempered its

edge;

For the household's restraint, and the discipline's

hedge;

For the lessons of kindness vouchsafed to the

least

Of the creatures of God, whether human or beast, Bringing hope to the poor, lending strength to the

frail

In the lanes of the city, the slave-hut, and jail;

For a womanhood higher and holier, by all

Her knowledge of good, than was Eve ere her fall,

Whose task-work of duty moves lightly as play,
Serene as the moonlight and warm as the day;

And, yet more, for the faith which embraces the whole,

Of the creeds of the ages the life and the soul, Wherein letter and spirit the same channel run, And man has not severed what God has made one!

For a sense of the Goodness revealed everywhere,
As sunshine impartial, and free as the air;
For a trust in humanity, Heathen or Jew,

And a hope for all darkness The Light shineth through.

Who scoffs at our birthright?-the words of the

seers,

And the songs of the bards in the twilight of years,

All the fore-gleams of wisdom in santon and sage, In prophet and priest, are our true heritage.

The Word which the reason of Plato discerned; The truth, as whose symbol the Mithra-fire burned The soul of the world which the Stoic but guessed, In the Light Universal the Quaker confessed!

No honors of war to our worthies belong;

Their plain stem of life never flowered into song; But the fountains they opened still gush by the

way,

And the world for their healing is better to-day.

He who lies where the minster's groined arches curve down

To the tomb-crowded transept of England's renown, The glorious essayist, by genius enthroned,

Whose pen as a sceptre the Muses all owned,

Who through the world's pantheon walked in his pride,

Setting new statues up, thrusting old ones aside,
And in fiction the pencils of history dipped,
To gild o'er or blacken each saint in his crypt,-

How vainly he labored to sully with blame
The white bust of Penn, in the niche of his fame!
Self-will is self-wounding, perversity blind:
On himself fell the stain for the Quaker designed!

For the sake of his true-hearted father before

him;

For the sake of the dear Quaker mother that bore

him ;

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401

For the sake of his gifts, and the works that outlive

him,

And his brave words for freedom, we freely forgive

him!

There are those who take note that our numbers are small,

New Gibbons who write our decline and our fall; But the Lord of the seed-field takes care of his own, And the world shall yet reap what our sowers have

sown.

The last of the sect to his fathers may go,

Leaving only his coat for some Barnum to show; But the truth will outlive him, and broaden with years,

Till the false dies away, and the wrong disappears.

Nothing fails of its end. Out of sight sinks the stone,

In the deep sea of time, but the circles sweep on, Till the low-rippled murmurs along the shores run, And the dark and dead waters leap glad in the sun.

Meanwhile shall we learn, in our ease, to forget To the martyrs of Truth and of Freedom our debt?

Hide their words out of sight, like the garb that they

wore,

And for Barclay's Apology offer one more?

Shall we fawn round the priestcraft that glutted the shears,

And festooned the stocks with our grandfathers' ears?

Talk of Woolman's unsoundness ?-count Penn heterodox?

And take Cotton Mather in place of George Fox ?