Feeling, thought, desire, the three deep fountains of affection. Son of Adam, or daughter of Eve, art thou trapped by nature, And is thy young cye dazzled with the pleasant form of beauty?

This is but a lower love; still it hath its honor,

What God hath made and meant to charm, let not man de

spise.

Nevertheless, as reason's child, look thou wisely further, For age, disease, and care, and sin, shall tarnish all the sur

face;

Reach a loftier love; be lured by the comeliness of mind,Gentle, kind, and calm, or lustrous in the livery of know

ledge.

And more there is a higher grade; force the mind to its per fection,

Win those golden trophies of consummate love:

Add unto riches of the reason, and a beauty moulded to thy

liking,

The precious things of nobler grace that well adorn a soul; Thus, be thou owner of a treasure, great in earth and hea

ven,

Beauty, wisdom, goodness,-in a creature like its God.

So then, draw we to an end; with feeble step and faltering, I follow beauty through the universe, and find her home Ubiquity:

In all that God hath made, in all that man hath marred, Lingereth beauty or its wreck, a broken mould and castings. And now, having wandered long time, freely and with desultory feet,

To gather in the garden of the world a few fair sample flowers,

With patient scrutinizing care let us cull the conclusion of

their essence,

And answer to the riddle of Zorobabel, Whence the might of beauty? (8)

UGLINESS is native unto nothing, but possible abstract evil: In everything created, at its worst, lurk the dregs of loveli

ness.

We be fallen into utter depths, yet once we stood sublime, For man was made in perfect praise, his Maker's comely image:

And so his new-born ill is spiced with older good,

He carrieth with him, yea, to crime, the withered limbs of

beauty.

Passions may be crooked generosities; the robber stealeth for his children;

Murder was avenger of the innocent, or wiped out shame with blood.

Many virtues, weighted by excess, sink among the vices,
Many vices, amicably buoyed, float among the virtues.
For, albeit sin is hate, a foul and bitter turpitude,

As hurling back against the Giver all his gifts with insult,
Still, when concrete in the sinner, it will seem to partake of

his attractions,

And in seductive masquerade shall cloak its leprous skin;
His broken lights of beauty shall illume its utter black,
And those refracted rays glitter on the hunch of its deformity.

VERILY the fancy may be false, yet hath it met me in my musings

(As expounding the pleasantness of pleasure, but no ways extenuating license),

That even those yearnings after beauty, in wayward wanton youth,

When guileless of ulterior end, it craveth but to look upon the lovely,

Seem like struggles of the soul, dimly remembering pre-exist

ence,

And feeling in its blindness for a long-lost god, to satisfy its

longing;

As if the sucking babe, tenderly mindful of his mother,

Should pull a dragon's dugs, and drain the teats of poison. Our primal source was beauty, and we pant for it ever and

again;

But sin hath stopped the way with thorns; we turn aside, wander, and are lost.

GOD, the undiluted good, is root and stock of beauty,
And every child of reason drew his essence from that stem.
Therefore, it is of intuition, an innate hankering for home,
A sweet returning to the well, from which our spirit flowed,
That we, unconscious of a cause, should bask these darkened
souls

In some poor relics of the light that blazed in primal beauty,
And, even like as exiles of idolatry, should quaff from the

cisterns of creation

Stagnant draughts, for those fresh springs that rise in the Creator.

ONLY, being burdened with the body, spiritual appetite is

warped,

And sensual man, with taste corrupted, drinketh of pollu

tions;

Impulse is left, but indiscriminate; his hunger feasteth upon

carrion;

His natural love of beauty doateth over beauty in decay.
He still thirsteth for the beautiful; but his delicate ideal

hath grown gross,

And the very sense of thirst hath been fevered from affection into passion.

He remembereth the blessedness of light, but it is with an old man's memory,

A blind old man from infancy, that once hath seen the sun, Whom long experience of night hath darkened in his cradle recollections,

Until his brightest thought of noon is but a shade of black.

THIS then is thy charm, O beauty, all pervading;

And this thy wondrous strength, O beauty, conqueror of all: The outline of our shadowy best, the pure and comely crea

ture,

That winneth on the conscience with a saddening admira

tion:

And some untutored thirst for God, the root of every pleasure, Native to creatures, yea in ruin, and dating from the birthday of the soul.

For God sealeth up the sum, confirmed exemplar of proportions,

Rich in love, full of wisdom, and perfect in the plenitude of Beauty. (9)

OF FAME.

BLOW the trumpet, spread the wing, fling thy scroll upon the sky,

Rouse the slumbering world, O Fame, and fill the sphere with echo:

Beneath thy blast they wake, and murmurs come hoarsely on the wind,

And flashing eyes and bristling hands proclaim they hear thy message:

Rolling and surging as a sea, that upturned flood of faces Hasteneth with its million tongues to spread the wondrous

tale,

The hum of added voices groweth to the roaring of a cata

ract,

And rapidly from wave to wave is tossed that exaggerated

story,

Until those stunning clamors, gradually diluted in the dis

tance,

Sink ashamed, and shrink afraid of noise, and die away.
Then brooding Silence, forth from his hollow caverns,

Cloaked and cowled, and gliding along, a cold and stealthy

shadow,

Once more is mingled with the multitude, whispering as he walketh,

And hushing all their eager ears to hear some newer Fame.

So all is still again; but nothing of the past hath been forgotten;

A stirring recollection of the trumpet ringeth in the hearts of

men;

And each one, either envious or admiring, hath wished the chance were his

To fill as thus the startled world with fame, or fear, or won

der.

This lit thy torch of sacrilege, Ephesian Eratostratus; (10) This dug thy living grave, Pythagoras, the traveller from Hades ;

For this, dived Empedocles into Ætna's fiery whirlpool; For this conquerors, regicides, and rebels, have dared their perilous crimes.

In all men, from the monarch to the menial, lurketh lust of fame;

The savage and the sage alike regard their labors proudly: Yea, in death, the glazing eye is illumined by the hope of reputation,

And the stricken warrior is glad, that his wounds are salved with glory.

FOR fame is a sweet self-homage, an offering grateful to the

idol,

A spiritual nectar for the spiritual thirst, a mental food for

A pregnant evidence to all of an after immaterial existence, A proof that soul is scatheless, when its dwelling is dissolved. And the manifold pleasures of fame are sought by the guilty and the good;