e its bowers are seen,
Which tells him soon his weary wandering endeth--

Soon shall he rest, in bosky shades of green,
By daisied meadows prankt with dewy flowers,
With ever-running rivulets between.

These are thy tasks, my sisters--these the powers
God in his goodness gives into thy hands:--
'Tis from thy fingers fall the diamond showers

Of budding Spring, and o'er the expectant lands
June's odorous purple and rich Autumn's gold:
And even when needful Winter wide expands

His fallow wings, and winds blow sharp and cold
From the harsh east, 'tis thine, o'er all the plain,
The leafless woodlands and the unsheltered wold,

Gently to drop the flakes of feathery rain--
Heaven's warmest down--around the slumbering seeds,
And o'er the roots the frost-blanched counterpane.

What though man's careless eye but little heeds
Even the effects, much less the remoter cause,
Still, in the doing of beneficent deeds--

By God and his Vicegerent Nature's laws--
Ever a compensating joy is found.
Think ye the rain-drop heedeth if it draws

Rankness as well as Beauty from the ground?
Or that the sullen wind will deign to wake
Only Aeolian melodies of sound--

And not the stormy screams that make men quake
Thus do ye act, my sisters; thus ye do
Your cheerful duty for the doing's sake--

Not unrewarded surely--not when you
See the successful issue of your charms,
Bringing the absent back again to view--

Giving the loved one to the lover's arms--
Smoothing the grassy couch in weary age--
Hushing in death's great calm a world's alarms.

I, I alone upon the earth's vast stage
Am doomed to act an unrequited part--
I, the unseen preceptress of the sage--

I, whose ideal form doth win the heart
Of all whom God's vocation hath assigned
To wear the sacred vesture of high Art--

To pass along the electric sparks of mind
From age to age, from race to race, until
The expanding truth encircles all mankind.

What without me were all the poet's skill?--
Dead, sensuous form without the quickening soul.
What without me the instinctive aim of will?--

A useless magnet pointing to no pole.
What the fine ear and the creative hand?
Most potent spirits free from man's control.

I, THE IDEAL, by the poet stand
When all his soul o'erflows with holy fire,
When currents of the beautiful and grand

Run glittering down along each burning wire
Until the heart of the great world doth feel
The ele