long, an easy Master,
Gives each tired toiler rest,
Counts not failure or disaster
If the striving be the best.

Go lad, go, 'tis Life that calls you,
Mates of old must soothe their pain,
Mindless of whate'er befalls you
If but honour still remain.

Rheims

In royal splendour rose the house of prayer,
Its mystic gloom arched over by the flight
Of soaring vault; above the nave's dim night
Rich gleamed the painted windows wondrous fair.
Sweet chimes and chanting mingled in the air;
Blue clouds of incense dimmed the vaulted height;
And on the altar, like a beacon light,
The gold cross glittered in the candles' glare.

To-day no bells, no choirs, no incense cloud,
For thou, O Rheims, art prey of evil powers;
But with a voice a thousand times more loud
Than siege-guns echoing round thy shattered towers,
Do thy mute bells to all the world proclaim
Thy martyred glory and thy foeman's shame.

The Mystic

The mystic sits by the sacred stream
Watching the sun as it mounts the sky;
And life to him is a haunting dream
Or a dim, weird pageant passing by.

Sorrow and joy go on their way,
Passion and lust and love and hate;
Only a band of mummers they,
Blindly led by the hand of fate.

Though the pageant is real, himself the dream,
Though men are born and strive and die,
Yet the mystic sits by the sacred stream
Watching the sun go down the sky.

A Song of the Homeland

I'll sing you a song of the Homeland,
Though the strains be of little worth,
A song of our own loved Homeland,
Of the noblest land upon earth;
Where the tide of the sea from oceans three
Beats high in its triple might,
Where the winds are born in a southern morn
And die in a polar night.

I'll sing you a song of the Eastland,
Of the land where our fathers died,
Where Saxon and Frank, their feuds long dead,
Are sleeping side by side;
Where their sons still toil on the hard-won soil
Of the mighty river plain,
Where the censer swings and the Angelus rings,
And the old faith lives again.

I'll sing you a song of the Westland
Where the magic cities rise,
And the prairies clothed with their golden grain
Stretch under the azure skies;
Where the mountains grim in the clouds grow dim
Far north in the arctic land,
And the northern light in its mystic flight