All that Omnipotence doth yet devise
  For human bliss, or rapture superhuman—­
Heaven upon earth, and earth still in the skies?

Do ye not sow the fruitful heart of woman
  With tenderest charities and faith sincere,
To feed man’s sterile soul and to illumine

His duller eyes, that else might settle here,
  With the bright promise of a purer region—­
A starlight beacon to a starry sphere?

Are they not all thy children, that bright legion—­
  Of aspirations, and all hopeful sighs
That in the solemn train of grave Religion

Strew heavenly flowers before man’s longing eyes,
  And make him feel, as o’er life’s sea he wendeth,
The far-off odorous airs of Paradise?—­

Like to the breeze some flowery island sendeth
  Unto the seaman, ere its bowers are seen,
Which tells him soon his weary wandering endeth—­

Soon shall he rest, in bosky shades of green,
  By daisied meadows prankt with dewy flowers,
With ever-running rivulets between.

These are thy tasks, my sisters—­these the powers
  God in his goodness gives into thy hands:—­
’Tis from thy fingers fall the diamond showers

Of budding Spring, and o’er the expectant lands
  June’s odorous purple and rich Autumn’s gold: 
And even when needful Winter wide expands

His fallow wings, and winds blow sharp and cold
  From the harsh east, ’tis thine, o’er all the plain,
The leafless woodlands and the unsheltered wold,

Gently to drop the flakes of feathery rain—­
  Heaven’s warmest down—­around the slumbering seeds,
And o’er the roots the frost-blanched counterpane.

What though man’s careless eye but little heeds
  Even the effects, much less the remoter cause,
Still, in the doing of beneficent deeds—­

By God and his Vicegerent Nature’s laws—­
  Ever a compensating joy is found. 
Think ye the rain-drop heedeth if it draws

Rankness as well as Beauty from the ground? 
  Or that the sullen wind will deign to wake
Only Aeolian melodies of sound—­

And not the stormy screams that make men quake
  Thus do ye act, my sisters; thus ye do
Your cheerful duty for the doing’s sake—­

Not unrewarded surely—­not when you
  See the successful issue of your charms,
Bringing the absent back again to view—­

Giving the loved one to the lover’s arms—­
  Smoothing the grassy couch in weary age—­
Hushing in death’s great calm a world’s alarms.

I, I alone upon the earth’s vast stage
  Am doomed to act an unrequited part—­
I, the unseen preceptress of the sage—­

I, whose ideal form doth win the heart
  Of all whom God’s vocation hath assigned
To wear the sacred vesture of high Art—­

To pass along the electric sparks of mind
  From age to age, from race to race, until
The expanding truth encircles all mankind.