aiting the hour when he at last shall fling
The stain in God's face, shrieking as he dies:
"Behold the unconquered arm that slew a king!"

AT THE PLAY.

The poet painted a woman's soul,
Human, trusting and kind,
And then he drew the soul of a man,
Brutal and base and blind;

And the woman loved in the old, old way,
And the man in the way of men,
And the poet christened their lives "A Play,"
And he sat down to watch it, and then ...

A woman rose with a bitter laugh,
And her eyes were as dry as stone
As she bowed her head at the poet's stall
And said in a strange, cold tone:

"He paints the best who has dipped his brush
In the heart's own blood, they say;
You took my love and you took my life,
But you gave the world--a play!"

THE DERELICT.

North and south with the fickle tides,
With the wind from east to west,
The death-ship follows her track of doom,
But finds no port or rest.

Day after day the far white sails
Come up and glimmer and die,
And night by night the twinkling lights
Crawl down the distant sky.

Day after day her black hull lifts
And sinks with the swell's long roll,
And the white birds cling to her rotting shrouds
Like prayers of a stricken soul,

But ever the death-ship keeps her track
While the ships of men sail on,
For God is her skipper and helmsman, too,
And knoweth her port alone.

ZOROASTER.

I.

The light of a new day was on his brow,
The faith of a great dawn was on his tongue;
Out of the dark he raised his voice and sung
The high Messiah who should overthrow
The gods that Superstition crowned with might
And set above the world,--the coming Christ
Whose unshed blood should be the holy tryst
'Twixt man and his lost Eden, washing white
From his rebellious soul the serpent's blight.

II.

The fire that on the Magi's altars glowed
Spake to his soul in symbols and expressed
The immortal purity that without rest
Strives with the mortal grossness whose abode
Is in the heart. Their symboled fire showed One
Whose spirit on the altar of the world
Burns ceaselessly,--where, if all vice be hurled,
It shall be purged with fire that shall atone,--
Christ's love the flame, man's sin th' alchemic stone.

III.