black terrors and fears.

The wounds of the old years ache newly; The gloom of the shop hems me in; But six o’clock signals come duly: O, freedom seems mine again, truly... Unhindered I haste from the din.

*  *  *  *  *

Now home again, ailing and shaking, With tears that are blinding my eyes, With bones that are creaking and breaking, Unjoyful of rest... merely taking A seat; hoping never to rise.

I gaze round me: none for a greeting! By Life for the moment unpressed, My poor wife lies sleeping—and beating A lip-tune in dream false and fleeting, My child mumbles close to her breast.

I look on them, weeping in sorrow, And think: “When the Reaper has come— When finds me no longer the morrow— What aid then?—from whom will they borrow The crust of dry bread and the home?

“What harbors that morrow,” I wonder, “For them when the breadwinner’s gone? When sudden and swift as the thunder The bread-bond is broken asunder, And friend in the world there is none.”

A numbness my brain is o’ertaking... To sleep for a moment I drop: Then start!... In the east light is breaking!— I drag myself, ailing and aching, Again to the gloom of the shop.

 The Candle Seller

In Hester Street, hard by a telegraph post, There sits a poor woman as wan as a ghost. Her pale face is shrunk, like the face of the dead, And yet you can tell that her cheeks once were red. But love, ease and friendship and glory, I ween, May hardly the cause of their fading have been. Poor soul, she has wept so, she scarcely can see. A skeleton infant she holds on her knee. It tugs at her breast, and it whimpers and sleeps, But soon at her cry it awakens and weeps— “Two cents, my good woman, three candles will buy, As bright as their flame be my star in the sky!”

Tho’ few are her wares, and her basket is small, She earns her own living by these, when at all. She’s there with her baby in wind and in rain, In frost and in snow-fall, in weakness and pain. She trades and she trades, through the good times and slack— No home and no food, and no cloak to her back. She’s kithless and kinless—one friend at the most, And that one is silent: the telegraph post! She asks for no alms, the poor Jewess, but still, Altho’ she is wretched, forsaken and ill, She cries Sabbath candles to those that come nigh, And all that she pleads is, that people 

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