The same gods grin at the banquet--
The idols of silver and gold--
While we drink from the cups of the Temple
As they did in the days of old,
But the finger of God is unheeded,
His warning misunderstood,
As "Mene" is written in lightning,
And "Tekel" inscribed in blood.

No lesson of Nebuchadnezzar
Turned out with his swinish kin
Creeps in like a baneful vision
At the Babylonian din;
We have stilled the tongue of our Daniel
Lest sudden he rise and cry:
"Behold! thy kingdom is numbered;
This night shall Belshazzar die!"

So it wouldn't be just to Belshazzar,
When speaking of madness and mirth,
To hold up his feast as a warning
To conscienceless sin in the earth,
For 'tis certain the King of Chaldea
Took note of the hand on the wall,
But here at the Feast of the Passions
We never take heed at all.

THE HUMAN WORLD.

Here is one picture of the human world:
An unreaped field and Death, the harvester,
Taking his rest beside a gathered sheaf
Of poppy and white lilies. At his side
Passion, with pilfered hour-glass in her hand
Jarring the sluggish sands to haste their flow.

THE VOW FORSWORN.

Unweariedly he watches for the sign,
The sign I promised from the farthest goal,
My lover of a world no longer mine,
My human lover with his human soul.

Unweariedly he waits from day to day,
Nor knows, as I know now, that when we meet,
'Twill be as dewdrop on the hawthorn spray,--
The ultimate of God at last complete.

He still remembers that my eyes were blue,
Still dreams the autumn russet of my hair;
"In God's own time," he said, "I'll come to you;
You will be waiting; I will find you there!"

But now I know that he must never hear
The message that I promised to impart,
For should I breathe the secret in his ear
His soul would hearken--but 'twould break his heart!

CONFESSION.

As one, a poet of a fairy's train,
Might sit beside a violet's stem and view
Its opening petals, watch the wondrous blue
Thrill through their fibers, and their secret gain
Of how the earth and sky and wind and rain
Had given them life and form and scent and hue,--
So I have gazed into the eyes of you,
Those rare blue eyes, and have not looked in vai