ll and titan shadow,
And the cannon of Trafalgar
Startle Spain.
Still the tides of fight are booming,
And the barren blood is spilt;
Still the banners are up-looming,
And the hands are on the hilt;
But the old world waxes wiser,
From behind the bolted visor
It descries at last the horror
And the guilt.
Yet the eyes are dim, nor wholly
Open to the golden gleam,
And the brute surrenders slowly
To the godhead and the dream.
From his cage of bar and girder,
Still at moments mad with murder,
Leaps the tiger, and his demon
Rules supreme.
One more war with fire and famine
Gathers--I can hear its cries--
And the years of might and Mammon
Perish in a world's demise;
When the strength of man is shattered,
And the powers of earth are scattered,
From beneath the ghastly ruin
Peace shall rise!
THE WOODCUTTER'S HUT
Far up in the wild and wintery hills in the heart of the cliff-broken
woods,
Where the mounded drifts lie soft and deep in the noiseless solitudes,
The hut of the lonely woodcutter stands, a few rough beams that show
A blunted peak and a low black line, from the glittering waste of snow.
In the frost-still dawn from his roof goes up in the windless,
motionless air,
The thin, pink curl of leisurely smoke; through the forest white and
bare
The woodcutter follows his narrow trail, and the morning rings and
cracks
With the rhythmic jet of his sharp-blown breath and the echoing shout of
his axe.
Only the waft of the wind besides, or the stir of some hardy bird--
The call of the friendly chickadee, or the pat of the nuthatch--is
heard;
Or a rustle comes from a dusky clump, where the busy siskins feed,
And scatter the dimpled sheet of the snow with the shells of the
cedar-seed.
Day after day the woodcutter toils untiring with axe and wedge,
Till the jingling teams come up from the road that runs by the valley's
edge,
With plunging of horses, and hurling of snow, and many a shouted word,
And carry away the keen-scented fruit of his cutting, cord upon cord.
Not the sound of a living foot comes else, not a moving visitant there,
Save the delicate step of some halting doe, or the sniff of a prowling
bear.
And only the stars are above him at night, and the trees that creak and
groan,
And the frozen, hard-swept mountain-crests with their silent fronts of
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