For which of us, indeed, is dead?
No more I lean to kiss your head, –
The gold-red hair so thick upon it:
Joy feels no more the touch that won it,
When o'er my brow your pearl-cool palm
In tenderness so childish, calm,
Crept softly, once. Yet, see, my arm
Is strong, and still my blood runs warm:

I still can work and think and weep.
But all this show of life I keep
Is but the shadow of your shine,
Flicker of your fire, husk of your vine;
Therefore you are not dead, nor I,
Who hear your laughter's minstrelsy.
Among the stars your feet are set;
Your little feet are dancing yet
Their rhythmic beat, as when on earth.
So swift, so slight, are death and birth!

Come not again, dear child. If thou
By any chance couldst break that vow
Of silence, at thy last hour made;
If to this grim life unafraid

Thou couldst return, and melt the frost
Wherein thy bright limbs' power was lost;
Still would I whisper- since so fair
The silent comradeship we share
Yes, whisper mid the unbidden rain
Of tears: "Come not! Come not again!"

THE VOICE OF THE VOID

I WARN, like the one drop of rain
On your face, ere the storm;
Or tremble in whispered refrain

With your blood, beating warm.
I am the presence that ever
Baffles your touch's endeavor,
Gone like the glimmer of dust
Dispersed by a gust.

I am the absence that taunts you,
The fancy that haunts you;
The ever unsatisfied guess
That, questioning emptiness,
Wins a sigh for reply.

Nay, nothing am I,
But the flight of a breath-
For I am Death!

God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him. GENESIS.

BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never
hopes,

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow ?

Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed

More filled with signs and portents for the soul

More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering

ages look;

Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity be trayed,

Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-
quenched?

How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the
light;

Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes ?