He sits astride an engine dread,
   And at his touch the awful ball
Across the quaking world is sped,
   I see a million creatures fall. 
Beyond the soldiers on the hill,
   The mother by her basinet. 
The bolt its mission must fulfil,
   And in the years that are not yet
Creation by the blow is shorn
Of dimpled hosts of babes unborn!

THE COMMON MEN.

The great men framed the fierce decrees
   Embroiling State with State;
They bit their thumbs across the seas
   In diplomatic hate;
They lit the pyre whose glare and heat
   Make Hell itself seem cold;
The flames bloomed red above the wheat,
Their wild profusion wreathed the street-
Then in the smoke and fiery sleet
   The common men took hold.

Where Babel was with Bedlam freed,
   And wide the gates were flung;
To chaos, while the anarch breed
   In all the world gave tongue,
The common men in close array,
   By mountain, plain and sea,
Went outward girded for the fray,
On one dear quest, whate’er they pay
In blood and pain—­the open way
   To keep for Liberty.

The common men who never tire,
   Unsightly in the mirk
Of caking blood and smoke and mire,
   Push forward with their work;
A while in foulest pits entombed,
   Resistless, still and slow,
Burnt, broken, stifled, seeming doomed,
Past where the flowers of Satan bloomed,
Up gutted hills with shell-breath plumed,
   The stubborn armies go.

Contending in the shattered sky
   In empyrean wars,
The sons of simple men out-vie
   God’s splendid meteors;
Where’er the mills of Vulcan roared
   And blinked against the night,
Swart shapes with sweat-washed eyes have
     stored
The clean, lean lightnings of the Lord
To be a league-long, leaping sword
   In this our holy fight.

The small men know the burden well,
   The dreadful paths they know,
With fear and death and torture dwell. 
   And sup and sleep with, woe. 
They’re riven in the shrapnel gust,
   But; blind and reeling, plan
Another blow, a final thrust
To subjugate the tyrant’s lust. 
So, bleeding, blundering in the dust,
   Men fight and die for man.

THE CHURCH BELLS.

The Viennese authorities have melted down the great bell in St. Stephen’s to supply metal for guns or muntions.  Every poor village has made a similar gift.—­Lokal Anzeiger.

The great bell booms across the town,
   Reverberant and slow,
And drifting from their houses down
   The calm-eyed people go. 
Their feet fall on the portal stones
   Their fathers’ fathers trod;
And still the bell, with reverent tones,
From cottage nooks and purple thrones
   Is calling souls to God.