Men called him but a shiftless youth,
      In whom no good they saw;
    And yet, unwittingly, in truth,
    They made his careless words their law.

    They knew not how he learned at all, 25
      For idly, hour by hour,
    He sat and watched the dead leaves fall,
    Or mused upon a common flower.

    It seemed the loveliness of things
      Did teach him all their use, 30
    For, in mere weeds, and stones, and springs,
    He found a healing power profuse.

    Men granted that his speech was wise,
      But, when a glance they caught
    Of his slim grace and woman’s eyes, 35
    They laughed, and called him good-for-naught.

    Yet after he was dead and gone,
      And e’en his memory dim,
    Earth seemed more sweet to live upon,
    More full of love, because of him. 40

    And day by day more holy grew
      Each spot where he had trod,
    Till after-poets only knew
    Their first-born brother as a god.

THE PRESENT CRISIS.

[In the year 1844, which is the date of the following poem, the question of the annexation of Texas was pending, and it was made an issue of the presidential campaign then taking place.  The anti-slavery party feared and opposed annexation, on account of the added strength which it would give to slavery, and the South desired it for the same reason.]

    When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
    Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
    And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
    To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
    Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time. 5

    Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
    When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro;
    At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,
    Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,
    And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart. 10

    So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
    Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,
    And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God
    In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,
    Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod. 15

    For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
    Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;[27]
    Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
    Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—­
    In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim. 20