PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. FROM FESTUS,' 20 FROM LUCIFER'S SERMON. LUCIFER speaks. COME, I'll unroll your hearts and read them to ye. To say ye live is but to say ye have souls, That ye have paid for them and mean to play them, Ye live and die on what your souls will fetch; Such baseness, such unthankfulness! Why he I once, say be just to God. Leave off these airs. Know your place -speak to God — and say, for Go first, Lord! Take your finger off your eye! It blocks the universe and God from sight. Think ye your souls are worth nothing to God? Are they so small? What can be great with God? What will ye weigh against the Lord? Yourselves? Bring out your balance: get in, man by man: Add earth, heaven, hell, the universe; that's all. And up we bounce, a bubble. Nought is great Nor small with God - for none but He can make But He can make a world: He counts the orbs, He counts the atoms of the universe, And makes both equal — both are infinite. Yourselves after Him ye are everything. But mind! God's more than everything; He is God. And what of me? No, us? no! I mean the Devil? Why see ye not he goes before both you And God? Men say · as proud as Lucifer doors Pray who would not be proud with such a train? ye see not. A WISH. FESTUS speaks. FOR me, I care not what 's to come, Nor for the fate by which I fall; But I would that I were Ocean's son, The solitary brave, Like yon sea-snake to climb upon The crest of the bounding wave. Within some pearled and coral cave; And moaning billow shall chant my dirge; STUDENTS. FESTUS speaks. . . ALL mankind are students. How to live And how to die forms the great lesson still. I know what study is: it is to toil Hard, through the hours of the sad midnight watch, And course of bootless penance. Night by night, This, to the young mind, wild and all in leaf, Which knowledge, grafting, paineth. Fruit soon comes, So that we joyed to have endured so much : Who but the generous fail? It is to think, While thought is standing thick upon the brain As dew upon the brow for thought is brain-sweat And gathering quick and dark, like storms in summer, It plays upon the heavens of the mind, GREAT THOUGHTS. FESTUS speaks. MAY you never Regret those hours which make the mind, if they Unmake the body; for the sooner we Are fit to be all mind, the better. Blest Is he whose heart is the home of the great dead, And their great thoughts. Who can mistake great thoughts? They seize upon the mind arrest, and search, And shake it bow the tall soul as by wind Rush over it like rivers over reeds, Which quaver in the current · turn us cold, And pale and voiceless; leaving in the brain A rocking and a ringing, — glorious But momentary, madness might it last, And close the soul with Heaven as with a seal! YOUTH. FESTUS speaks. THE night is glooming on us. It is the hour |