Know I not thy mount, O Carmel! Have I not voyaged on the

Danube ?

Nor seen the glare of Arctic snows, nor the black tents of the

Tartar?

Is it then a dream, that I remember the faces of them of old, While wandering in the grove with Plato, and listening to Zeno in the porch?

Paul have I seen, and Pythagoras, and the Stagyrite hath spoken me friendly,

And His meek eye looked also upon me, standing with Peter in the

palace.

Athens and Rome, Persepolis and Sparta, am I not a freeman of you all?

And chiefly can my yearning heart forget thee, O Jerusalem ?

For the strong magic of conception, mingled with the fumes of

memory,

Giveth me a life in all past time, yea, and addeth substance to the future.

Be ye my judges, imaginative minds, full-fledged to soar into the

sun,

Whose grosser natural thoughts the chemistry of wisdom hath sub

limed,

Have ye not confessed to a feeling, a consciousness, strange and

vague,

That ye have gone this way before, and walk again your daily life, Tracking an old routine, and on some foreign strand,

Where bodily ye have never stood, finding your own footsteps? Hath not at times some recent friend looked out an old familiar, Some newest circumstance or place teemed as with ancient mem

ories ?

A startling, sudden flash lighteth up all for an instant,

And then it is quenched, as in darkness, and leaveth the cold spirit trembling.

MEMORY is not wisdom; idiots can rote volumes :

Yet, what is wisdom without memory? a babe that is strangled in

its birth,

The path of the swallow in the air, the path of the dolphin in the

waters,

A cask running out, a bottomless chasm; such is wisdom without

memory.

There be many wise, who cannot store their knowledge;

Yet from themselves are they satisfied, for the fountain is within:
There be many who store, but have no wisdom of their own,
Lumbering their armory with weapons their muscles cannot lift:
There be many thieves and robbers, who glean and store unlawfully,
Calling in to memory's help some cunningly-devised Cabala:
But to feed the mind with fatness, to fill thy granary with corn,
Nor clog with chaff and straw the threshing-floor of reason,
Reap the ideas, and house them well; but leave the words high
stubble;

Strive to store up what was thought, despising what was said.

For the mind is a spirit, and drinketh in ideas, as flame melteth

into flame;

But for words, it must pack them as on floors, cumbrous and perishable merchandise.

To be pained for a minute, to fear for an hour, to hope for a week how long and weary!

But to remember fourscore years, is to look back upon a day.
An avenue seemeth to lengthen in the eyes of the wayfaring man,
But let him turn, those stationed elms crowd up within a yard;
Pace the lamp-lit streets of some sleeping city,

The multitude of cressets shall seem one, in the false picture of perspective;

Even so, in sweet treachery, dealeth the aged with himself;

He gazeth on the green hill-tops, while the marshes beneath are hidden,

And the partial telescope of memory pierceth the blank between,
To look with lingering love at the fair star of childhood.
Life is as the current spark on the miner's wheel of flints:
Whiles it spinneth there is light; stop it, all is darkness:

Life is as a morsel of frankincense burning in the hall of Eternity:
It is gone, but its odorous cloud curleth to the lofty roof!

Life is as a lump of salt, melting in the temple-laver;

It is gone, yet its savor reacheth to the farthest atom;

Even so, for evil or for good, is life the criterion of a man,

For its memories of sanctity or sin pervade all the firmament of

being.

There is but the flitting moment, wherein to hope or to enjoy,
But in the calendar of memory, that moment is all time.

THE DREAM OF AMBITION..

I LEFT the happy fields that smile around the village of Content,
And sought with wayward feet the torrid desert of Ambition.
Long time, parched and weary, I travelled that burning sand,
And the hooded basilisk and adder were strewed in my way for
palms;

Black scorpions thronged me round, with sharp, uplifted stings,
Seeming to mock me as I ran : (then I guessed it was a dream, -
But life is oft so like a dream, we know not where we are :)
So I toiled on, doubting in myself, up a steep gravel cliff,
Whose yellow summit shot up far into the brazen sky;
And quickly I was wafted to the top, as upon unseen wings,
Carrying me upward like a leaf: (then I thought it was a dream,
Yet life is oft so like a dream, we know not where we are :)

So I stood on the mountain, and behold! before me a giant pyramid,

And I clomb with eager haste its high and difficult steps;

For I longed, like another Belus, to mount up, yea, to heaven,
Nor sought I rest until my feet had spurned the crest of earth.

THEN I sat on my granite throne under the burning sun, And the world lay smiling beneath me, but I was wrapt in flames; (And I hoped, in glimmering consciousness, that all this torture was a dream,

Yet life is oft so like a dream, we know not where we are.) And anon, as I sat scorching, the pyramid shuddered to its root, And I felt the quarried mass leap from its sand foundations: Awhile it tottered and tilted, as raised by invisible levers, (And now my reason spake with me; I knew it was a dream; Yet I hushed that whisper into silence, for I hoped to learn of wisdom,

By tracking up my truant thoughts, whereunto they might lead,) And suddenly, as rolling upon wheels, adown the cliff it rushed, And I thought, in my hot brain, of the Muscovite's icy slope;

A thousand yards in a moment we ploughed the sandy seas,
And crushed those happy fields, and that smiling village;
And onward, as a living thing, still rushed my mighty throne,
Thundering along, and pounding, as it went, the millions in my

way:

Before me all was life, and joy, and full-blown summer,

Behind me death and woe, the desert and simoom.

Then I wept and shrieked aloud, for pity and for fear;

But might not stop, for, comet-like, flew on the maddened mass
Over the crashing cities, and falling obelisks and towers,

And columns, razed as by a scythe, and high domes, shivered as an egg-shell,

And deep embattled ranks, and women, crowded in the streets.
And children, kneeling as for mercy, and all I had ever loved,
Yea, over all, mine awful throne rushed on with seeming instinct,
And over the crackling forests, and over the rugged beach,
And on with a terrible hiss through the foaming, wild Atlantic,
That roared around me as I sat, but could not quench my spirit,
Still on, through startled solitudes we shattered the pavement of the
sea,

Down, down, to that central vault, the bolted doors of hell;
And these, with horrid shock, my huge throne battered in,

And on to the deepest deep, where the fierce flames were hottest,

Blazing tenfold as conquering furiously the seas that rushed in with me,

And there I stopped; and a fearful voice shouted in mine ear,

"Behold the home of Discontent; behold the rest of Ambition!"

OF SUBJECTION.

LAW hath dominion over all things, over universal mind and matter;

For there are reciprocities of right, which no creature can gainsay. Unto each there was added by its Maker, in the perfect chain of

being,

Dependencies and sustentations, accidents, and qualities, and powers;

And each must fly forward in the curve, unto which it was forced from the beginning;

Each must attract and repel, or the monarchy of Order is no

more.

Laws are essential emanations from the self-poised character of

God,

And they radiate from that sun to the circling edges of creation. Verily, the mighty Lawgiver hath subjected Himself unto laws, And God is the primal grand example of free, unstrained obedience:

His perfection is limited by right, and cannot trespass into wrong, Because He hath stablished Himself as the fountain of only good, And in thus much is bounded, that the evil hath he left unto

another,

And that dark other hath usurped the evil which Omnipotence laid down.

Unto God there exist impossibilities; for the True One cannot

lie,

Nor the Wise One wander from the track which he hath determined

for himself;

For his will was purposed from eternity, strong in the love of

order;

And that will altereth not, as the law of the Medes and Persians. God is the origin of order, and the first exemplar of his precept; For there is subordination of his Essence, self-guided unto holi

ness;