TO FREDERICK A. P. BAR

NARD.

And if perchance too late I linger where The flowers have ceased to blow, and trees are bare,

Thou, wiser in thy choice, wilt scarcely blame

The friend who shields his folly with thy name.

AMESBURY, 10h mo., 1870.

MIRIAM.

ONE Sabbath day my friend and I
After the meeting, quietly
Passed from the crowded village lanes,
White with dry dust for lack of rains,
And climbed the neighboring slope,
with feet

Slackened and heavy from the heat,
Although the day was wellnigh done,
And the low angle of the sun
Along the naked hillside cast
Our shadows as of giants vast.
We reached, at length, the topmost
swell,

Whence, either way, the green turf fell
In terraces of nature down

To fruit-hung orchards, and the town With white, pretenceless houses, tall Church-steeples, and, o'ershadowing all,

Huge mills whose windows had the look

Of eager eyes that ill could brook
The Sabbath rest. We traced the track
Of the sea-seeking river back
Glistening for miles above its mouth,
Through the long valley to the south.
And, looking eastward, cool to view,
Stretched the illimitable blue

Of ocean, from its curved coast-line;
Sombred and still, the warm sunshine
Filled with pale gold-dust all the reach

From mystery to mystery!

So, sitting on that green hill-slope,
We talked of human life, its hope
And fear, and unsolved doubts, and
what

It might have been, and yet was not.
And, when at last the evening air
Grew sweeter for the bells of prayer
Ringing in steeples far below,
We watched the people churchward go,
Each to his place, as if thereon
The true shekinah only shone;
And my friend queried how it came
To pass that they who owned the same
Great Master still could not agree
To worship Him in company.
Then, broadening in his thought, he

ran

Over the whole vast field of man,
The varying forms of faith and creed
That somehow served the holders'
need;

In which, unquestioned, undenied,
Uncounted millions lived and died;
The bibles of the ancient folk,
Through which the heart of nations
spoke;

The old moralities which lent
To home its sweetness and content,
And rendered possible to bear
The life of peoples everywhere:
And asked if we, who boast of light,
Claim not a too exclusive right
To truths which must for all be meant,
Like rain and sunshine freely sent.
In bondage to the letter still,

We give it power to cramp and kill, -
To tax God's fulness with a scheme

And I made answer "Truth is one;
And, in all lands beneath the sun,
Whoso hath eyes to see may see
The tokens of its unity.

No scroll of creed its fulness wraps,
We trace it not by school-boy maps,
Free as the sun and air it is
Of latitudes and boundaries.
In Vedic verse, in dull Korán,
Are messages of good to man;
The angels to our Aryan sires
Talked by the earliest household fires;
The prophets of the elder day,
The slant-eyed sages of Cathay,
Read not the riddle all amiss
Of higher life evolved from this.

"Nor doth it lessen what He taught,
Or make the gospel Jesus brought
Less precious, that His lips retold
Some portion of that truth of old;
Denying not the proven seers,
The tested wisdom of the years;
Confirming with his own impress
The common law of righteousness.
We search the world for truth; we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful,
From graven stone and written scroll,
From all old flower-fields of the soul;
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our mothers read,
And all our treasure of old thought
In His harmonious fulness wrought
Who gathers in one sheaf complete
The scattered blades of God's sown

wheat,

The common growth that maketh good His all-embracing Fatherhood.

"Wherever through the ages rise The altars of self-sacrifice, Where love its arms has opened wide, Or man for man has calmly died, I see the same white wings outspread That hovered o'er the Master's head! Up from undated time they come, The martyr souls of heathendom, And to His cross and passion bring Their fellowship of suffering. I trace His presence in the blind Pathetic gropings of my kind, In prayers from sin and sorrow wrung, In cradle-hymns of life they sung, Each, in its measure, but a part Of the unmeasured Over-Heart; And with a stronger faith confess The greater that it owns the less. Good cause it is for thankfulness That the world-blessing of His life With the long past is not at strife; That the great inarvel of His death To the one order witnesseth,

No doubt of changeless goodness wakes,

No link of cause and sequence breaks,
But, one with nature, rooted is
In the eternal verities;
Whereby, while differing in degree
As finite from infinity,

The pain and loss for others borne,
Love's crown of suffering meekly

worn,

The life man giveth for his friend
Become vicarious in the end;
Their healing place in nature take,
And make life sweeter for their sake.

"So welcome I from every source
The tokens of that primal Force,
Older than heaven itself, yet new
As the young heart it reaches to,
Beneath whose steady impulse rolls
The tidal wave of human souls;
Guide, comforter, and inward word,
The eternal spirit of the Lord!
Nor fear I aught that science brings
From searching through material
things;

Content to let its glasses prove,
Not by the letter's oldness move,

421

The myriad worlds on worlds that

course

The spaces of the universe;
Since everywhere the Spirit walks
The garden of the heart, and talks
With man, as under Eden's trees,
In all his varied languages.
Why mourn above some hopeless flaw
In the stone tables of the law,
When scripture every day afresh
Is traced on tablets of the flesh?
By inward sense, by outward signs,
God's presence still the heart divines;
Through deepest joy of Him we learn,
In sorest grief to Him we turn,
And reason stoops its pride to share
The child-like instinct of a prayer.

And then, as is my wont, I told A story of the days of old, Not found in printed books, - in sooth, A fancy, with slight hint of truth, Showing how differing faiths agree In one sweet law of charity. Meanwhile the sky had golden grown, Our faces in its glory shone : But shadows down the valley swept, And gray below the ocean slept, As time and space I wandered o'er To tread the Mogul's marble floor, And see a fairer sunset fall

On Jumna's wave and Agra's wall.

Silent the monarch gazed, until the night

Swift-falling hid the city from his sight, Then to the woman at his feet he said: "Tell me, O Miriam, something thou hast read

In childhood of the Master of thy faith, Whom Islam also owns. Our Prophet saith:

'He was a true apostle, yea, — a Word And Spirit sent before me from the Lord.'

Thus the Book witnesseth; and well I know

By what thou art, O dearest, it is so. As the lute's tone the maker's hand betrays,

The sweet disciple speaks her Master's praise."