Oh sweet, beyond all speech, to feel
  Within no answer to the drum,
  Or echo to the bugle-peal,
  That calls to duties which benumb
  In service of the commonweal!

  Oh sweet to feel, beyond all speech,
  That most and best of human kind
  Have leave to live beyond the reach
  Of toil that tarnishes, and find
  No tongue but Envy’s to impeach!

  Oh sweet, that most unnoticed deeds
  Give play to fine, heroic blood!—­
  That hid from light, and shut from weeds,
  The rose is fairer in its bud
  Than in the blossom that succeeds!

    He is the helpless slave who must;
    And she enfranchised who may sit
    Unblamed above the din and dust,
    Where stronger hands and coarser wit
    Strive equally for crown and crust.

    So ran her thought, and broader yet,
    Who scanned her own by Philip’s pace;
    And never did the wife forget
    Her grateful tribute for the grace
    That charged her with so sweet a debt.

    So ran her thought; and in her breast
    Her wifely pride to pity grew,
    That Philip, by his Lord’s behest—­
    To duty and to nature true—­
    Must do his bravest and his best.

    Through winter’s cold and summer’s heat,
    Where all might praise and all might blame,
    And thus be topic of the street,
    And see his fair and honest name
    A football, kicked by careless feet.

    She loved her creed, and doubting not
    She read it well from Nature’s scroll,
    She found no line or word to blot;
    But, from her woman’s modest soul,
    Thanked her Creator for her lot.

  VIII.

  He who, upon an Alpine peak,
  Stands, when the sunrise lifts the East,
  And gilds the crown and lights the cheek
  Of largest monarch down to least,
  Of all the summits cold and bleak,

  Finds sadly that it brings no boon
  For all his long and toilsome leagues,
  And chill at once and weary soon,
  Rests from his fevers and fatigues,
  And waits the recompense of noon,

  For then the valleys, near and far,
  The hillsides, fretted by the vine,
  The glacier-drift and torrent-scar
  Whose restless waters shoot and shine,
  And many a tarn, that like a star

  Trembles and flames with stress of light,
  And many a hamlet and chalet
  That dots with brown, or paints with white,
  The landscape quivering in the day,
  With beauty all his toil requite.

  Mountains, from mountain altitudes
  Are only hills, as bleak and bare;
  And he whose daring step intrudes
  Upon their grandeur, and the rare
  Cold light or gloom that o’er them broods,

  Finds that with even brow to stand
  Among the heights that bade him climb,
  Is loss of all that made them grand,
  While all of lovely and sublime
  Looks up to him from lake and land.