Let theist, atheist, pantheist,
Define and wrangle how they list,-
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer;
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer,
Unknowing war, unknowing crime,
Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme.
Heed not what the brawlers say,
Heed thou only Saadi's lay.
Let the great world bustle on

With war and trade, with camp and town.
A thousand men shall dig and eat,
At forge and furnace thousands sweat,
And thousands sail the purple sea,
And give or take the stroke of war,
Or crowd the market and bazaar.
Oft shall war end, and peace return,
And cities rise where cities burn,
Ere one man my hill shail climb
Who can turn the golden rhyme;
Let them manage how they may,
Heed thou only Saadi's lay.
Seek the living among the dead:
Man in man is imprisoned.
Barefooted Dervish is not poor,
If fate unlock his bosom's door,
So that what his eye hath seen

His tongue can paint, as bright, as keen,
And what his tender heart hath felt
With equal fire thy heart shall melt.
For whom the Muses shine upon,
And touch with soft persuasion,
His words like a storm-wind can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable

Lurketh nature veritable;

And though he speak in midnight dark,
In heaven no star, on earth no spark,
Yet before the listener's eye

Swims the world in ecstasy,

The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,

Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be,
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
Saadi! so far thy words shall reach ;
Suns rise and set in Saadi's speech.

And thus to Saadi said the Muse;
"Eat thou the bread which men refuse;
Flee from the goods which from thee flee;
Seek nothing; Fortune seeketh thee.
Nor mount, nor dive; all good things keep
The midway of the eternal deep.
Wish not to fill the isles with eyes
To fetch thee birds of paradise.
On thine orchard's edge belong
All the brass of plume and song;
Wise Ali's sunbright sayings pass
For proverbs in the market-place;
Through mountains bored by regal art
Toil whistles as he drives his cart.
Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
A poet or a friend to find;

Behold, he watches at the door,
Behold his shadow on the floor

Open innumerable doors,

The heaven where unveiled Allah pours
The flood of truth, the flood of good,
The seraph's and the cherub's food;
Those doors are men; the pariah kind
Admits thee to the perfect Mind.
Seek not beyond thy cottage-wall
Redeemer that can yield thee all.
While thou sittest at thy door,
On the desert's yellow floor,
Listening to the grey-haired crones,
Foolish gossips, ancient drones,—
Saadi, see, they rise in stature
To the height of mighty Nature,
And the secret stands revealed
Fraudulent Time in vain concealed,
That blessed gods in servile masks
Plied for thee thy household tasks."

BLIGHT.

GIVE me truths,

For I am weary of the surfaces,

And die of inanition. If I knew

Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and pimpernel,
Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,

Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,

And rare and virtuous roots which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,

Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,-
Oh that were much, and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun,
And planted world, and full executor
Of their imperfect functions!

But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,

And travelling often in the cut he makes,

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,

And all their botany is Latin names.

The old men studied magic in the flower,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,

Our eyes

Preferring things to names; for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,
And, wheresoever their clear eyebeams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the SAME.
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
The injured elements say "Not in us;"
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant, and mineral, say "Not in us,"
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain,

G

We devastate them unreligiously,

And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.
Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is due.

But the sweet affluence of love and song,
The rich results of the divine consents

Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;

And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out

Daily to a more thin and outward rind,

Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes,
The stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay.
And nothing thrives to reach its natural term ;
And life, shorn of its venerable length,
Even at its greatest space, is a defeat,
And dies in anger that it was a dupe,
And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
Is early frugal like a beggar's child:
With most unhandsome calculation taught,
Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,
Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped,
Chilled with a miserly comparison

Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.

MAY-DAY.

DAUGHTER of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring,
With sudden passion languishing,

Maketh all things softly smile,

Painteth pictures mile on mile,

Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,

Whence a smokeless incense breathes.

Girls are peeling the sweet willow,

Poplar white, and Gilead-tree;

And troops of boys

Shouting with whoop and hilloa,
And hip hip three times three!

The air is full of whistlings bland;
What was that I heard

Out of the hazy land?

Harp of the wind, or song of bird,
Or clapping of shepherd's hands,
Or vagrant booming of the air,
Voice of a meteor lost in day?
Such tidings of the starry sphere
Can this elastic air convey.
Or haply 'twas the cannonade
Of the pent and darkened lake,
Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade,
Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,
Afflicted moan, and latest hold

Even unto May the iceberg cold.

Was it a squirrel's pettish bark,

Or clarionet of jay? or hark

Where yon wedged line the nestor leads,

Steering north with raucous cry

Through tracts and provinces of sky,
Every night alighting down

In new landscapes of romance,

Where darkling feed the clamorous clans
By lonely lakes to men unknown.
Come the tumult whence it will,
Voice of sport, or rush of wings,
It is a sound, it is a token,
That the marble sleep is broken,
And a change has passed on things.

Beneath the calm, within the light,
A hid unruly appetite

Of swifter life, a surer hope,
Strains every sense to larger scope,
Impatient to anticipate

The halting steps of aged Fate.

Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl : When Nature falters, fain would zeal

Grasp the felloes of her wheel,

And grasping give the orbs another whirl.