FORESIGHT.

  An “actors’ cemetery”!  Sure
    The devil never tires
  Of planning places to procure
  The sticks to feed his fires.

A FAIR DIVISION.

  Another Irish landlord gone to grass,
  Slain by the bullets of the tenant class! 
  Pray, good agrarians, what wrong requires
  Such foul redress?  Between you and the squires
  All Ireland’s parted with an even hand—­
  For you have all the ire, they all the land.

GENESIS.

  God said:  “Let there be Man,” and from the clay
  Adam came forth and, thoughtful, walked away. 
  The matrix whence his body was obtained,
  An empty, man-shaped cavity, remained
  All unregarded from that early time
  Till in a recent storm it filled with slime. 
  Now Satan, envying the Master’s power
  To make the meat himself could but devour,
  Strolled to the place and, standing by the pool,
  Exerted all his will to make a fool. 
  A miracle!—­from out that ancient hole
  Rose Morehouse, lacking nothing but a soul. 
  “To give him that I’ve not the power divine,”
  Said Satan, sadly, “but I’ll lend him mine.” 
  He breathed it into him, a vapor black,
  And to this day has never got it back.

LIBERTY.

  “‘Let there be Liberty!’ God said, and, lo! 
  The red skies all were luminous.  The glow
    Struck first Columbia’s kindling mountain peaks
  One hundred and eleven years ago!”

  So sang a patriot whom once I saw
  Descending Bunker’s holy hill.  With awe
    I noted that he shone with sacred light,
  Like Moses with the tables of the Law.

  One hundred and eleven years?  O small
  And paltry period compared with all
    The tide of centuries that flowed and ebbed
  To etch Yosemite’s divided wall!

  Ah, Liberty, they sing you always young
  Whose harps are in your adoration strung
    (Each swears you are his countrywoman, too,
  And speak no language but his mother tongue).

  And truly, lass, although with shout and horn
  Man has all-hailed you from creation’s morn,
    I cannot think you old—­I think, indeed,
  You are by twenty centuries unborn.

  1886.

THE PASSING OF “BOSS” SHEPHERD.

  The sullen church-bell’s intermittent moan,
  The dirge’s melancholy monotone,
  The measured march, the drooping flags, attest
  A great man’s progress to his place of rest. 
  Along broad avenues himself decreed
  To serve his fellow men’s disputed need—­
  Past parks he raped away from robbers’ thrift
  And gave to poverty, wherein to lift
  Its voice to curse the giver and the gift—­
  Past noble structures that he reared for men
  To meet in and revile him, tongue and pen,
  Draws the long retinue of death to show
  The fit credentials of a proper woe.