Doth o'er us pass, when, as the expanding eye
To the loved object, so the tear to the lid
Will start, which lately slept in apathy?
And yet it need not be that object — hid
From us in life, but common which doth lie

Each hour before us but then only bid

-

With a strange sound, as of a harp-string broken, To awake us. 'Tis a symbol and a token

4

Of what in other worlds shall be, and given In beauty by our God to those alone Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven, Drawn by their heart's passion, and that tone, That high tone of the spirit, which hath striven, Though not with Faith, with godliness, whose throne With desperate energy 't hath beaten down; Wearing its own deep feeling as a crown.

"T

EVENING STAR

WAS noontide of summer,

And stars, in their orbits, Shone pale, through the light Of the brighter, cold moon, 'Mid planets her slaves, Herself in the Heavens, Her beam on the waves. I gazed awhile

On her cold smile,

Too cold. too cold for me;

There passed, as a shroud,
A fleecy cloud,

And I turned away to thee,
Proud Evening Star,

In thy glory afar,

And dearer thy beam shall be;

For joy to my heart

Is the proud part

Thou bearest in Heaven at night,

And more I admire

Thy distant fire

Than that colder, lowly light.

DREAMS

OH, that my young life were a lasting dream!

My spirit not awakening, till the beam

Of an Eternity should bring the morrow!

Yes! though that long dream were of hopeless

sorrow,

"T were better than the cold reality

Of waking life to him whose heart must be,
And hath been still, upon the lovely earth,
A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.
But should it be that dream eternally
Continuing - as dreams have been to me
In my young boyhood, should it thus be given,
'T were folly still to hope for higher Heaven.
For I have revelled, when the sun was bright
In the summer sky, in dreams of living light
And loveliness,—have left my very heart
In climes of mine imagining, apart

From mine own home, with beings that have been
Of mine own thought what more could I have seen?
"T was once and only once

and the wild hour

From my remembrance shall not pass some power
Or spell had bound me; 't was the chilly wind
Came o'er me in the night, and left behind

Its image on my spirit, or the moon

Shone on my slumbers in her lofty noon
Too coldly, or the stars, howe'er it was,

That dream was as that night-wind — let it pass.

I have been happy, though in a dream.
I have been happy- and I love the theme-

Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality, which brings
To the delirious eye more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love and all our own

Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.

THE LAKE: TO

N spring of youth it was my lot

IN

To haunt of the wide world a spot The which I could not love the less, So lovely was the loneliness

Of a wild lake, with black rock bound, And the tall pines that towered around.

'But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody,

Then ah, then I would awake

To the terror of the lone lake.
Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight:

A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define,
Nor love—although the love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave

For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining,

Whose solitary soul could make

An Eden of that dim lake.