Where spirit-voices called to join the feast of shells.
O'er Indian plains and ocean-girdled isles
With brow of beauty Truth serenely smiles;
The nations bow, as light is shed abroad,
And break their idols for the living God.
Where purple streams from human victims run
And votive flesh hangs quivering in the sun,
Quenched are the pyres, as shines salvation's star--
Grim Juggernaut is trembling on his car
And cries less frequent come from Ganges' waves
Where infant forms sink into watery graves.
Where heathen prayers flamed by the cocoa tree
They supplicate the Christians' Deity
And chant in living aisles the vesper hymn
Where giant god-trees rear their temples dim.
Still speed thy truth!--still wave thy spirit sword,
Till every land acknowledge Thee the Lord,
And the broad banner of the Cross, unfurled
In triumph, wave above a subject world.
And here O God! where feuds thy church divide--
The sectary's rancor, and the bigot's pride--
Melt every heart, till all our breasts enshrine
One faith, one hope, one love, one zeal divine,
And, with one voice, adoring nations call
Upon the Father and the God of all.

[Footnote A: The Pantheon that was built to all the gods was transformed
into a Christian temple.]

THE INFANT ST. JOHN, THE BAPTIST.

O sweeter than the breath of southern wind
With all its perfumes is the whisper'd prayer
From infant lips, and gentler than the hind,
The feet that bear
The heaven-directed youth in wisdom's pathway fair.

And thou, the early consecrate, like flowers
Didst shed thy incense breath to heaven abroad;
And prayer and praise the measure of thy hours,
The desert trod
Companionless, alone, save of the mighty God.

As Phosphor leads the kindling glory on,
And fades, lost in the day-god's bright excess,
So didst thou in Redemption's coming dawn,
Grow lustreless,
The fading herald of the Sun of Righteousness.

But when the book of life shall be unsealed,
And stars of glory round the throne divine
In all their light and beauty be revealed,
The brightest thine
Of all the hosts of earth with heavenly light shall shine.

SHELLEY'S OBSEQUIES.

Ibi tu calentem
Debita sparges lacryma favillam
Vatis amici.

--Horace.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, an eminent English poet, while sailing in the
Mediterranean sea, in 1822, was drowned off the coast of Tuscany in
a squall which wrecked