To assign just place and mates;

Answers not in word or letter,

Yet is understood the better;

Is to his friend a looking-glass,

Reflects his figure that doth pass.

Every wayfarer he meets

What himself declared repeats,

What himself confessed records,

Sentences him in his words;

The form is his own corporal form,

And his thought the penal worm.

Yet shine forever virgin minds,

Loved by stars and purest winds,

Which, o’er passion throned sedate,

Have not hazarded their state;

Disconcert the searching spy,

Rendering to a curious eye

The durance of a granite ledge

To those who gaze from the sea’s edge.

It is there for benefit;

It is there for purging light;

There for purifying storms;

And its depths reflect all forms;

It cannot parley with the mean, –

Pure by impure is not seen.

For there’s no sequestered grot,

Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot,

But Justice, journeying in the sphere,

Daily stoops to harbor there.

ETIENNE DE LA BOÉCE

I serve you not, if you I follow,

Shadowlike, o’er hill and hollow;

And bend my fancy to your leading,

All too nimble for my treading.

When the pilgrimage is done,

And we’ve the landscape overrun,

I am bitter, vacant, thwarted,

And your heart is unsupported.

Vainly valiant, you have missed

The manhood that should yours resist, –

Its complement; but if I could,

In severe or cordial mood,

Lead you rightly to my altar,

Where the wisest Muses falter,

And worship that world-warming spark

Which dazzles me in midnight dark,

Equalizing small and large,

While the soul it doth surcharge,

That the poor is wealthy grown,

And the hermit never alone, –

The traveller and the road seem one

With the errand to be done, –

That were a man’s and lover’s part,

That were Freedom’s whitest chart.

SUUM CUIQUE

The rain has spoiled the farmer’s day;

Shall sorrow put my books away?

Thereby are two days lost:

Nature shall mind her own affairs;

I will attend my proper cares,

In rain, or sun, or frost.

COMPENSATION

Why should I keep holiday

When other men have none?

Why but because, when these are gay,

I sit and mourn alone?

And why, when mirth unseals all tongues,

Should mine alone be dumb?

Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs,

And now their hour is come.

FORBEARANCE

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?

At rich men’s tables eaten bread and pulse?

Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust?

And loved so well a high behavior,

In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,

Nobility more nobly to repay?

O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!

BERRYING

‘May be true what I had heard, –

Earth’s a howling wilderness,

Truculent with fraud and force,’

Said I, strolling through the pastures,

And along the river-side.

Caught among the blackberry vines,

Feeding on the Ethiops sweet,

Pleasant fancies overtook me.

I said, ‘What influence me preferred,