THE GLEANER.

LIGHTLY o'er the waving meadow,

Swelled the Reaper's shout;
Like a burst of pleasant music,
Ringing gladly out:

And the sound came soft and clear-
To the weary gleaner's ear:

Noontide sunshine, warm and golden,
Quivered through the air,

While in dreams of hours long parted,
Still she lingered there.

Leaning on the little gateway,
With a thoughtful eye,
Calling up unfaded memories,
From the times gone by:
Here her life had passed away,
Like a varied summer's day:

For if clouds had paled her sunshine

With a colder gleam,

Still the love that lingered through it,
Was a summer beam.

Here in childhood-happy-hearted,

In her merry glee,

She had found a mute companion,

In each waving tree:

For each leaflet's breezy stir,

Brought a thought of home to her.

Dearer than the fleeting fancies
Of the proud and great,

Were the gentle gleaner's musings,
At the rustic gate.

H. M.

THE MEETING.

FROM THE ENTRANCED," AN UNPUBLISHED POEM.

BY HENRY B. HIRST.

Author of "The Coming of the Mammoth, the Funeral of Time, and other Poems."

BESIDE a broken fountain, feathered o'er

With greenest mosses; on what once was floor
Of verd antique with veins as white as snow,
(Relic of grandeur, fashioned long ago!)
A maiden in the bloom of beauty stood.

To see her thus beside that babbling flood

One might have deemed her Nereid of the fountain,
Or dove-eyed Dryad from the wooded mountain
That over-hung the lush and verdant valley;
For on her little harp she musically
Made melodies of the old forgotten times,

Accompanying them with silver-sounding rhymes,—
Lays of the loves of many a glowing god
Whose footsteps in the ancient cycles trod
The laurelled hills and violet covered plains,
Where now eternal Ruin, silent reigns—
Laments o'er glories that the hand of age

(Away beyond the mists of centuries)

Had blotted even from the historic page

Stories of fights upon the purple seasWith many a fancy round which she had thrown The azure robes and starry studded zone Of Poet's passion-offspring of her own!

While, as she leaned against that fountain's rim,
An aged man, in feature stern and grim,
Between two pillars of a fallen fane
Stood, listening to the language of her strain.
He was no common wight, for in his eye,
Majestic mien and on his fore-head high
Sat god-like intellect, and in his gait
A royalty that seemed to mock at fate,
And soar above his seeming mean estate.
His silver locks lay slumbering on a brow
By time embrowned, as peacefully as snow
Sleeps on the mountain-top: his cheek below,
Marked with the furrows of the primal sage,
Burned with the blazon of a ruddy age:
There was a fire within his sunken eyes,

A scorn of earth upon his curling lip
Which said could Lethe's raven waters rise

Again on earth, how gladly would I sip Their dim forgetfulness, 'till all the past Had faded, like the dust before the blast."

And there the stranger stood, and there the maid, Age with its snow, youth with its flowers arrayed;

He, like a statue of that golden Past,

Whose ruins lay around him; she, the last
(The brightest, fairest, noblest, proudest clay!)

Sweet image of her own serener day:

Yet as the volume of her voice rolled out,