ws.

When man is shorn of strength, and there is left
Only Omnipotence, we kiss the rod--
The very rod that smites us. In the cleft
We would attempt to hide from Deity,
Yet in his anger is an answered prayer--
The consciousness of presence; though we flee,
The wrath of love, is proof of constant care.
But when we beat against the empty air,
And every echo sends us back despair,
And even superstition, fails to foil
Our souls with the deceptive glow of spoil,
Then are we bittered, and our path made black;
We grope in mists, Cimmerian, on the wrack
Of constant and interminable doubt,
A natural prey, and easy put to rout.

To South, and West, they turn their fateful way
Beyond the Mississippi; and their day
Seemed lighted with a new influx of hope.
The sun embraced them with a warmer smile;
The mellow fragrance of the Southern slope
Added entrancement each succeeding mile.
Not all at once the exodus took place,
For they were many, and had scattered wide;
Yet to the southward all had set their face
To seek in other fields a place to hide
From cruel persecutions. When our kin
Lends its consanguined arder to the dart,
How more intent, with vengeful purposes,
How heavier is the load upon the heart!

They scatter into fragmentary clans,
And in the earnest of their added woe,
Give birth to new religious phantasies.
The unclogged streams of superstition flow,
When down the mountains, and across the moors,
The heavy, swollen torrents sweep along,
Throwing their scattered wrecks upon the shores,
And breaking barriers, however strong.
Baal was great, when Baalbec reared her crest
And column after column gave her grace
And all the East upon her beauty smiled;
But when the "owls and bats" usurped her place,
The god had fallen. In the temple dust,
Where man, with his immortal, had so strove
To make the marble animate (in vain,
Like other myriad phantoms of the brain)
Time fashions into ghostly hands, that sternly point above.
And so, God reaps involuntary praise,
From every fashioning of man's design;
His ways, indeed, cannot be called our ways;
Yet his hozannas, from each crumbling shrine,
Teach us the servitude of all the past;
That human hands but fashion Heavenly aids;
That every sculptured mythmark only fades
Into eternal sunshine, at the last.

Some crossed the mounta