The Restoration of Israel.

KING of the dead! how long shall sweep
Thy wrath! how long thy outcasts weep!
Two thousand agonizing years

Has Israel steeped her bread in tears;
The vials on her head been poured-
Flight, famine, shame, the scourge, the sword.
"Tis done! Has breathed thy trumpet blast:
The tribes at length have wept their last!
On rolls the host! From land and wave

The earth sends up th' unransomed slave!
There rides no glittering chivalry,

No banner purples in the sky;

The world within their hearts has died;

Two thousand years have slain their pride!
The look of pale remorse is there,

The low, involuntary prayer;

The form still marked with many a stain-
Brand of the soil, the scourge, the chain;
The serf of Afric's fiery ground;

The slave by Indian suns embrowned;

The weary drudges of the oar,

By the swart Arab's poisoned shore ;

THE RESTORATION OF ISRAEL.

The gatherings of earth's wildest tract—
On burst the living cataract !

What strength of man can check its speed?
They come !-the Nation of the Freed?
Who leads their march? Beneath his wheel
Back rolls the sea, the mountains reel!
Before their tread his trump is blown,
Who speaks in thunder and 'tis done!
King of the dead! oh! not in vain
Was thy long pilgrimage of pain;
Oh, not in vain arose thy prayer,

When pressed the thorn thy temples bear!
Oh, not in vain the voice that cried,

To spare thy maddened homicide!

Even for this hour thy heart's blood streamed,
They come !-the Host of the Redeemed!
What flames upon the distant sky?

Tis not the comet's sanguine dye,
'Tis not the lightning's quivering spire,
'Tis not the sun's ascending fire.

And now, as nearer speeds their march,
Expands the rainbow's mighty arch;
Though there has burst no thunder-cloud,
No flash of death the soil has ploughed,
And still ascends before their gaze,
Arch upon arch, the lovely blaze;
Still as the gorgeous clouds unfold,
Rise towers and domes, immortal mould.
Scenes! that the patriarch's visioned eye
Beheld, and then rejoiced to die ;—

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282

THE RESTORATION OF ISRAEL.

That like the altar's burning coal,

Touched the pale prophet's harp with soul;-
That the throned seraphs long to see,

Now given, thou slave of slaves, to thee!
Whose city this? what potentate

Sits there?-The King of time and fate!
Whom glory covers like a robe,

Whose sceptre shakes the solid globe,
Whom shapes of fire and splendor guard!
There sits the Man "whose face was marred,"

To whom archangels bow the knee-
The Weeper in Gethsemane!

Down in the dust, aye, Israel, kneel,
For now thy withered heart can feel!
Ay, let thy wan cheek burn like flame,
There sits thy glory and thy shame!

George Croly.

The Saviour's Second Eaming.

WHEN all the cherub-thronging clouds shall shine,
Irradiate with his bright advancing sign:

When that Great Husbandman shall wave his fan,
Sweeping, like chaff, thy wealth and pomp away;
Still to the noontide of that nightless day,

Shalt thou thy wonted dissolute course maintain.
Along the busy mart and crowded street,

The buyer and the seller still shall meet,
And marriage feasts begin their jocund strain:
Still to the pouring out the cup of woe;
Till earth, a drunkard, reeling to and fro,

And mountains molten by his burning feet,

And heaven, his presence own, all red with furnace heat.

The hundred-gated cities, then,

The towers and temples, named of men

Eternal, and the thrones of kings;

The gilded summer palaces,

The courtly bowers of love and ease,

Where still the bird of pleasure sings:

Ask ye the destiny of them?

Go gaze on fallen Jerusalem!

Yea, mightier names are in the fatal roll,

'Gainst earth and heaven God's standard is unfurled,

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THE SAVIOUR'S SECOND COMING.

The skies are shriveled like a burning scroll,

And the vast common doom ensepulchres the world.
Oh! who shall then survive?

Oh! who shall stand and live?

When all that hath been is no more:

When for the round earth hung in air,

With all its constellations fair,

In the sky's azure canopy:

When for the breathing earth, and sparkling sea,
Is but a fiery deluge without shore,
Heaving along the abyss profound and dark,
A fiery deluge, and without an ark.
Lord of all power, when thou art there alone
On thy eternal fiery-wheeled throne,

That in its high meridian noon

Needs not the perished sun nor moon :

When thou art there in thy presiding state,

Wide sceptered monarch o'er the realm of doom:
When from the sea depths, from earth's darkest womb,

The dead of all the ages round thee wait:

And when the tribes of wickedness are strewn

Like forest leaves in the autumn of thine ire:

Faithful and true thou still wilt save thine own!
The saints shall dwell within th' unharming fire!
Yes, 'mid yon angry and destroying signs,
O'er us the rainbow of thy mercy shines,
We hail, we bless the covenant of its beam,
Almighty to avenge, Almightiest to redeem !

H. H. Milman.