The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859. Various

        O Father, let me not die young!

        Earth's beauty asks a heart and tongue

        To give true love and praises to her worth;

        Her sins and judgment-sufferings call

        For fearless martyrs to redeem thy Earth

        From her disastrous fall.

        For though her summer hills and vales might seem

        The fair creation of a poet's dream,—

        Ay, of the Highest Poet,

        Whose wordless rhythms are chanted by the gyres

        Of constellate star-choirs,

        That with deep melody flow and overflow it,—

        The sweet Earth,—very sweet, despite

        The rank grave-smell forever drifting in

        Among the odors from her censers white

        Of wave-swung lilies and of wind-swung roses,—

        The Earth sad-sweet is deeply attaint with sin!

        The pure air, which incloses

        Her and her starry kin,

        Still shudders with the unspent palpitating

        Of a great Curse, that to its utmost shore

        Thrills with a deadly shiver

        Which has not ceased to quiver

        Down all the ages, nathless the strong beating

        Of Angel-wings, and the defiant roar

        Of Earth's Titanic thunders.

        Fair and sad,

        In sin and beauty, our beloved Earth

        Has need of all her sons to make her glad;

        Has need of martyrs to re-fire the hearth

        Of her quenched altars,—of heroic men

        With Freedom's sword, or Truth's supernal pen,

        To shape the worn-out mould of nobleness again.

        And she has need of Poets who can string

        Their harps with steel to catch the lightning's fire,

        And pour her thunders from the clanging wire,

        To cheer the hero, mingling with his cheer,

        Arouse the laggard in the battle's rear,

        Daunt the stern wicked, and from discord wring

        Prevailing harmony, while the humblest soul

        Who keeps the tune the warder angels sing

        In golden choirs above,

        And only wears, for crown and aureole,

        The glow-worm light of lowliest human love,

        Shall fill with low, sweet undertones the chasms

        Of silence, 'twixt the booming thunder-spasms.

        And Earth has need of Prophets fiery-lipped

        And deep-souled, to announce the glorious dooms

        Writ on the silent heavens in starry script,

        And flashing fitfully from her shuddering tombs,—

        Commissioned Angels of the new-born Faith,

        To teach the immortality of Good,

        The soul's God-likeness, Sin's coeval death,

        And Man's indissoluble Brotherhood.

        Yet never an age, when God has need of him,

        Shall want its Man, predestined by that need,

        To pour his life in fiery word or deed,—

        The strong Archangel of the Elohim!

        Earth's hollow want is prophet of his coming:

        In the low murmur of her famished cry,

        And heavy sobs breathed up despairingly,

        Ye hear the near invisible humming

        Of his wide wings that fan the lurid sky

        Into cool ripples of new life and hope,

        While far in its dissolving ether ope

        Deeps beyond deeps, of sapphire calm, to cheer

        With Sabbath gleams the troubled Now and Here.

        Father! thy will be done,

        Holy and righteous One!

        Though the reluctant years

        May never crown my throbbing brows with white,

        Nor round my shoulders turn the golden light

        Of my thick locks to wisdom's royal ermine:

        Yet by the solitary tears,

        Deeper than joy or sorrow,—by the thrill,

        Higher than hope or terror, whose quick germen,

        In those hot tears to sudden vigor sprung,

        Sheds, even now, the fruits of graver age,—

        By the long wrestle in which inward ill

        Fell like a trampled viper to the ground.

        By all that lifts me o'er my outward peers

        To that supernal stage

        Where soul dissolves the bonds by Nature bound,—

        Fall when I may, by pale disease unstrung,

        Or by the hand of fratricidal rage,

        I cannot now die young!