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.