THE WHITE CZAR.

[In an English magazine of 1877 there appeared a version of some insolent lines addressed by 'A Russian Poet to the Empress of India.' To these the first of the two following sonnets was designed to serve by way of counterblast. The writer will scarcely be suspected of royalism or imperialism; but it seemed to him that an insult levelled by Muscovite lips at the ruler of England might perhaps be less unfitly than unofficially resented by an Englishman who was also a republican.]

I.

GEHAZI by the hue that chills thy cheek

And Pilate by the hue that sears thine hand Whence all earth's waters cannot wash the brand That signs thy soul a manslayer's though thou speak

All Christ, with lips most murderous and most meek

Thou set thy foot where England's used to stand !

Thou reach thy rod forth over Indian land!

Slave of the slaves that call thee lord, and weak

As their foul tongues who praise thee! son of them
Whose presence put the snows and stars to shame
In centuries dead and damned that reek below

Curse-consecrated, crowned with crime and flame,
To them that bare thee like them shalt thou go
Forth of man's life-a leper white as snow.

II.

Call for clear water, wash thine hands, be clean,
Cry, What is truth? O Pilate; thou shalt know
Haply too soon, and gnash thy teeth for woe
Ere the outer darkness take thee round unseen
That hides the red ghosts of thy race obscene

Bound nine times round with hell's most dolorous flow

And in its pools thy crownless head lie low

By his of Spain who dared an English queen

With half a world to hearten him for fight,

Till the wind gave his warriors and their might

To shipwreck and the corpse-encumbered sea : But thou, take heed, ere yet thy lips wax white, Lest as it was with Philip so it be,

O white of name and red of hand, with thee.

RIZPAH.

How many sons, how many generations,

For how long years hast thou bewept, and known

Nor end of torment nor surcease of moan,

Rachel or Rizpah, wofullest of nations,

Crowned with the crowning sign of desolations,

And couldst not even scare off with hand or groan

Those carrion birds devouring bone by bone

The children of thy thousand tribulations?

Thou wast our warrior once; thy sons long dead
Against a foe less foul than this made head,

Poland, in years that sound and shine afar;

Ere the east beheld in thy bright sword-blade's stead

The rotten corpse-light of the Russian star

That lights towards hell his bondslaves and their Czar.

TO LOUIS KOSSUTH.

LIGHT of our fathers' eyes, and in our own
Star of the unsetting sunset! for thy name,

That on the front of noon was as a flame

In the great year nigh twenty years agone
When all the heavens of Europe shook and shone

With stormy wind and lightning, keeps its fame
And bears its witness all day through the same ;
Not for past days and great deeds past alone,
Kossuth, we praise thee as our Landor praised,
But that now too we know thy voice upraised,
Thy voice, the trumpet of the truth of God,

Thine hand, the thunder-bearer's, raised to smite