ny, our web of Fate we spin;
This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin;
Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal's cloudy crown,
We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down.

"By all for which the Martyrs bore their agony and shame,
By all the warning words of truth with which the Prophets came,
By the Future which awaits us, by all the hopes which cast
Their faint and trembling beams across the darkness of the Past,
And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth's freedom died,
O my people! O my brothers! let us choose the righteous side.

"So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way,
To wed Penobscot's waters to San Francisco's bay,
To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales with grain,
And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in his train;
The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea,
And mountain unto mountain call, 'PRAISE GOD, FOR WE ARE FREE!'"

These are less to be named poems than pieces of rhythmic
oratory,--oratory crystallized into poetic form, and carrying that
deeper significance and force which from all vitalized form are
inseparable. A poem, every work of Art, must rest in itself; oratory is
a means toward a specific effect. The man who writes poems may have aims
which underlie and suffuse his work; but they must not be partial, they
must be coextensive with the whole spirit of man, and must enter his
work as the air enters his nostrils. The moment a definite, partial
effect is sought, the attitude of poetry begins to be lost. These
battle-pieces are therefore a warfare for the possession of the poet's
ideal, not the joyous life-breath of that ideal already victorious in
him. And the other poems of this first great epoch in his poetical life,
though always powerful, often beautiful, yet never, we think, show a
_perfect_ resting upon his own poetic heart.

In the year 1850 appeared the "Songs of Labor, and other Poems"; and in
these we reach the transition to his second epoch. Here he has already
recognized the pure ground of the poem,--

"Art's perfect forms no moral need,
And beauty is its own excuse,"--

but his modesty declines attempting that perfection, and assigns him a
lower place. He must still seek definite uses, though this use be to
lend imagination or poetic depth to daily labor:--

"But for the dull and flowerless weed
Some healing virtue still