class="t3">THE EXCLUSION OF ASIATICS.

Is our renown'd Dominion then so small
    As not to hold this new inhabitant?
    Or are her means so pitiably scant
As not to yield a livelihood to all?
Or are we lesser men, foredoom'd to thrall?
    Or so much better than the immigrant
    That we should make our hearts as adamant
And guard against defilement with a wall?

Nay, but our land is large and rich enough
    For us and ours and millions more—her need
        Is working men; she cries to let them in.
Nor can we fear; our race is not the stuff
    Servants are made of, but a royal seed,
        And Christian, owning all mankind as kin.

THE PEOPLE'S RESPONSE TO HEROISM.

Our hearts are set on pleasure and on gain.
    Fine clothes, fair houses, more and daintier bread;
We have no strivings, and no hunger-pain
    For spiritual food; our souls are dead.
So judged I till the day when news was rife
    Of fire besieging scholars and their dames,
And bravely one gave up her own fair life
    In saving the most helpless from the flames.

Then when I heard the instantaneous cheer
    That broke with sobbing undertones from all
The multitude, and watched them drawing near,
    Stricken and mute, around her funeral pall
In grief and exultation, I confest
My judgment erred,—we know and love the best.

AN ARISTOCRAT.

Her fair companions she outshone,
    As this or that transcendent star
Makes all its sister orbs look wan
    And dim and lustreless and far.

Her charm impressed the fleeting glance,
    But chiefly the reflective mind;
A century's inheritance,
    By carefull'st nurture still refined.

Devotions, manners, hopes that were,
    Ideals high, traditions fine,
Were felt to culminate in her,
    The efflorescence of her line.

What time and cost conspired to trace
Her lineaments of perfect grace!

IN WAREHOUSE AND OFFICE.

How can the man whose uneventful days,
    Each like the other, are obscurely spent
Amid the mill's dead products, keep his gaze
    Upon a lofty goal serenely bent?
Or he who sedulously tells and groups
    Their minted shadows with deft finger-tips?
Or who above the shadow's shadow stoops,
    And dips his pen and writes, and writes and dips?

How can he? Yet some such have been and are,
    Prophets and seers in deed, if not in word,
And poets of a faery land afar,
    By incommunicable music stirred;
Feasting the soul apart with what it craves,
Their occupation's masters, not its slaves.

H. M. S. "DREADNOUGHT."

Titanic craft of many thousand tons,
    A smaller Britain free to come and go,
Relying on thy ten terrific guns
    To daunt afar the most presumptuous foe;
Thick-panoplied with plates of hardened steel,
    Equipped with all the engin'ry of death,
Unrivalled swiftness in thy massive keel,
    Annihilation latent in thy breath.

"Dreadnought" thy name. And yet, for all thy size
    And strength, the ocean might engulf thy prow,
Or the swift red torpedo of the skies,
    The lightning, blast thy boast-emblazoned brow;
Thou hast thy use, but Britain's sons were wise
    To put their trust in better things than thou.

THE REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA.

From Lapland to the land of Tamerlane,
    Kamchatka to the confines of the Turk,
The spirit tyrants never can restrain
    When once awake is mightily at work.
Liberty, frantic with a fearful hope,
    Out of long darkness suddenly arisen,
Maddens the dull half-human herds who grope
    And rend the bars of their ancestral prison.

Over the wan lone steppe her couriers speed,
    The secret forest echoes her command,
She smites the sword that made her children bleed,
    And Death and Havoc hold the famished land.
But God overrules, and oft man's greatest good
Is won through nights of dread and days of blood.

TEA'S APOLOGIA.

Loved by a host from Noah's days till now,
    Extolled by bards in many a glowing line,
My purple rival of the mantling brow
    May laugh to scorn this swarthy face of mine.
I care not: many a weary pain I cure;
    Cold, heat and thirst I harmlessly abate;
I bless the weak, the aged and the poor;
    And I have known the favor of the great.

I've cheered the minds of mighty poets gone;
    Philosophers have owned my solace true;
Shy Cowper was my sweet Anacreon;
    Keen Hazlitt craved "whole goblets" of my brew;
De Quincey praised my stimulating draught;
What cups of me old Doctor Johnson quaffed!

A WISH.

When my time comes to quit this pleasing scene,
    And drop from out the busy life of men;
When I shall cease to be where I have been
    So willingly, and ne'er may be again;
When my abandoned tabernacle's dust
    With dust is laid, and I am counted dead;
Ere I am quite forgotten, as I must
    Be in a little while, let this be said:

He loved this good God's world, the night and day,
    Men, women, children (these he loved the best);
Pictures and books he loved, and work and play,
    Music and silence, soberness and jest;
His mind was open, and his heart was gay;
    Green be his grave, and peaceful be his rest!

ALONE WITH NATURE.

The rain came suddenly, and to the shore
    I paddled, and took refuge in the wood,
    And, leaning on my paddle, there I stood
In mild contentment watching the downpour,
Feeling as oft I have felt heretofore,
    Rooted in nature, that supremest mood
    When all the strength, the peace, of solitude,
Sink into and pervade the being's core.

And I have thought, if man could but abate
    His need of human fellowship, and find
        Himself through Nature, healing with her balm
The world's sharp wounds, and growing in her state,
    What might and greatness, majesty of mind,
        Sublimity of soul and Godlike calm!

THE WORKS OF MAN AND OF NATURE.

Man's works grow stale to man: the years destroy
    The charm they once possessed; the city tires;
    The terraces, the domes, the dazzling spires
Are in the main but an attractive toy—
They please the man not as they pleased the boy;
    And he returns to Nature, and requires
    To warm his soul at her old altar fires,
To drink from her perpetual fount of joy.

It is that man and all the works of man
    Prepare to pass away; he may depend
        On naught but what he found her stores among;
But she, she changes not, nor ever can;