Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky,
Lest the happy model should be lost,
Had been mimicked in fairy masonry

By the elfin builders of the frost.

Within the hall are song and laughter,
The cheeks of Christmas glow red and
jolly,

And sprouting is every corbel and rafter
With lightsome green of ivy and holly;
Through the deep gulf of the chimney
wide

Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide;
The broad flame-pennons droop and flap
And belly and tug as a flag in the
wind;

Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap,
Hunted to death in its galleries blind;
And swift little troops of silent sparks,
Now pausing, now scattering away as
in fear,

Go threading the soot-forest's tangled
darks

Like herds of startled deer.

But the wind without was eager and
sharp,

Of Sir Launfal's gray hair it makes a harp,
And rattles and wrings
The icy strings,
Singing, in dreary monotone,

A Christmas carol of its own,
Whose burden still, as he might guess,
Was
"Shelterless, shelterless, shel-

terless!"

A single crow on the tree-top bleak From his shining feathers shed off the cold sun;

Again it was morning, but shrunk and
cold,

As if her veins were sapless and old,
And she rose up decrepitly

For a last dim look at earth and sea.

II.

Sir Launfal turned from his own hard
gate,

For another heir in his earldom sate;
An old, bent man, worn out and frail,
He came back from seeking the Holy
Grail;

Little he recked of his earldom's loss,
No more on his surcoat was blazoned the

cross,

But deep in his soul the sign he wore,
The badge of the suffering and the poor.

III.

Sir Launfal's raiment thin and spare
Was idle mail 'gainst the barbed air,
For it was just at the Christmas time;
So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier
clime,

And sought for a shelter from cold and

snow

In the light and warmth of long-ago;
He sees the snake-like caravan crawl
O'er the edge of the desert, black and
small,

Then nearer and nearer, till, one by one,

The voice of the seneschal flared like a He can count the camels in the sun,

torch

As he shouted the wanderer away from the porch,

And he sat in the gateway and saw all night

The great hall-fire, so cheery and bold,
Through the window-slits of the cas-
tle old,

Build out its piers of ruddy light
Against the drift of the cold.

PART SECOND.

I.

THERE was never a leaf on bush or tree,
The bare boughs rattled shudderingly;
The river was dumb and could not speak,
For the weaver Winter its shroud had

spun;

As over the red-hot sands they pass
To where, in its slender necklace of grass,
The little spring laughed and leapt in
the shade,

And with its own self like an infant
played,

And waved its signal of palms.