Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/691

 SAMUEL Y. MORHIS. Samuel V. Morris, who wishes to be recorded as a Hoosier " to the manner born," was bom at Indianapolis, about the year 1835. He is yet a resident of that city, and is a lawyer by profession. He has contributed to the Knickerbocker maga- zine, to the Indiana State Journal, and other " Hoosier " papers. E TRIBUS UNUM. Upon the headland Now, We stand and gaze upon the troubled sea That lashes round its base. The heavy haze Of dim forgetfulness hangs like a cloud About us, and with eager ken we strive To pierce its misty depths. But all in vain. Still, ever and anon, a wave of thought Comes surging in from out the gloom, and oft In this torn fragment of the ocean Past, We recognize the joyous wave that bore Us 'long the summer sea of life, when Then Was Now. But fast it hurries on far in The gloom of the To Be, and yet again 'Twill meet us, when To Be is Now. And thus To Be, and Is, and Was are one In their relations to our lives. The soul Is the grand reservoir wherein the Past Empties its springs. And our future life Complete or faulty, in its outward show Is but our present inner life exposed. The Past we may deplore, and ought, if lost. But if 'tis past and living, be content ; For it, though past, may in its oflPspring live. What joys ! what sorrows ! and what gilded dreams, Like ivy 'round the fallen oak, still chng With living tendrils to the cold, dead forms Of by-gone years! The soul with in- turned eye Full gazing in itself, oft sees the Past Reflected there, and dreams itself away To other years, and 'tis not well. The Past, All vital in the soul in its effects, Is a great prompter of eternal thoughts ; But when the soul lives in the Past, oh, then The Future will be marred, and all the thoughts Will smell of other years, unless they pass Through the refining fire that burns and glows Within the furnace Now. Then let the Past Live in the soul, the soul not in the Past ! And from the Past and Present, fashion well The Future, so that when the Was and Is And the To Come in Time are gone, the soul May fashion out of Time a Future, fair And comely, for Eternity. (675)