And nursed in rosy bowers.

A mountain land with flaming brand,

Will rush on the invader,

Resolved to be forever free,

As the Almighty made her.

MOST people have experienced precisely the sensations which inspired a little poem called "Two Moods":

I. All yesterday you were so near to me,
It seemed as if I hardly moved or spoke
But your heart moved with mine. I woke
To a new life that found me everywhere,
As if your love was as some wide-girt sea.
Or as the sunlit air;

And so encompassed me,

Whether I thought or not, it could not but be there.

2. To-day your words approve me, and your heart

Is mine as ever, yet the heavenly sense

Of oneness that made every hour intense

With love's full perfectness, is gone from thence;

And though our hands are clasped, our souls are two,

And in my thoughts I say, "This is myself—this you !"

THE Granger goeth into his broad fields, and he falleth unto buzzing himself:

My lord rides through his palace gate,

My lady sweeps along in state,

The sage thinks long on many a thing,

And the maiden muses on marrying;

The minstrel harpeth merrily,
The sailor plows the foaming sea,

The huntsman kills the good red deer,
And the soldier wars without a fear;
Nevertheless, whate'er befall,

The farmer he must feed them all.

THE writer has long admired the fidelity and brevity of this rural picture a picture, too, which is so rich in detail that it would require more time to look at the original than it does to read this portrayal :

Beside the pasture bars, the cows,

With heavy udders, patient stand;
And shrilly clucking mother-hens

Their errant broods to rest command.
Up from the pond, and 'cross the green,
Homeward the geese in straggling line.
The call of fowls, the bleat of lambs,

The plaintive low of waiting kine,
The night-hawk's earthward-swooping flight,
All tell of day's decline.

And through oak openings, far away,

'Mid palest greens and faintest pinks,

'Mid changing hues that have no name,
The yellow sun majestic sinks.

A WAIF of three stanzas called "The Workingman tains these lines :

The working men, whate'er the task,

Who carve the stone, or bear the hod,

They bear upon their honest brows
The royal stamp and seal of God;

And worthier are their drops of sweat

Than diamonds in a coronet.

HERE is a sample of delicate opposition, conveying as fine a sparkle of fun as may be found:

THERE were a few lines in "The Black Crook," so notorious fifteen years ago, which had a good deal of ring to them. Fetch out the word " drag" with all the throat that will stick to it:

If when the brazen tongue of clamorous time
Proclaim the hour of twelve, no wail of soul
By him betrayed break on the shore of hell,
Drag him before us.

A LONDON poet named Bourdillon has lately pleased all the world with eight lines of verse.

in the future:

He is likely to be heard from

JOHN PIERPONT, of Boston, hit upon the following language in a long screed called " A Word from a Petitioner," composed in 1840. The lines have reference to the theoretical operation of the principle of universal suffrage, and the weapon alluded to is the ballot-box :

THE play of "Ingomar, the Barbarian, " uses a verse of poetry, of which two lines are exceedingly good and two are quite bad:

What love is, if thou wouldst be taught,

Thy heart must teach alone;

Two souls with but a single thought,

Two hearts that beat as one.

FRANCIS M. FINCH wrote "The Blue and the Gray," the refrain of which is a linking of simplicity and force :

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment day;

Tears and love for the Blue,

Love and tears for the Gray.

HORACE SMITH'S "Address to the Mummy" has some stanzas which will not readily depart from the mind after they have been carefully read:

(a.)
(b.)

5. Perhaps that very hand, now pinioned flat,

Has hob-a-nobbed with Pharaoh, glass to glass;

Or dropped a half-penny in Homer's hat,

Or doffed thine own to let Queen Dido pass,

Or held, by Solomon's invitation,

A torch at the great Temple's dedication.
2. I need not ask thee if that hand, when armed,

Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled,
For thou wert dead, and buried, and embalmed,
Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled:
Antiquity appears to have begun

Long after thy primeval race was run.

9. Since first thy form was in this box extended
The Roman Empire has begun and ended.
Didst thou not hear the pother o'er thy head,

IO.

When the great Persian conqueror, Cambyses,

Marched armies o'er thy tomb with thunderin; tread,
O'erthrow Osirus, Orus, Apis, Isis?

In the days when Horace Smith gazed upon the dried-up Egyptian, such curiosities were genuine. But in this age of atheism, when men neither fear God nor reverence antiquity, any sentiment spent on mummies is crocodile, like the skin they are made out of.

ALONG Somewhere in 1870 a gentleman in the East made a translation of Virgil's Æneid, which was warranted to be perfectly harmless as a "pony" for collegiates seeking the royal road to Latin scholarship. Here was one of Dido's didos : She beat upon her breasts tremendously,

And tore her back-hair most stupendously.

SOMETIMES a whole volume of feeling can be put into two or three little words by a person of genius, and what would have attracted no particular attention in an extended form becomes matter for frequently-recurring contemplation if first sprung suddenly from behind some little sentence. The poem called by its author, Mrs Ethel L. Beers, "The Picket Guard," but by the world "All Quiet Along the Potomac To-Night," is a shining example of the force to be obtained through the proper compression of pathetic language:

1. "All quiet along the Potomac," they say,

'Except now and then a stray picket

Is shot, as he walks on his beat to and fro,

By a rifleman hid in the thicket."

3. There's only the sound of the lone sentry's tread
As he tramps from the rock to the fountain,
And he thinks of the two in the low trundle-bed,

Far away in the cot on the mountain.

His musket falls slack; his face dark and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,

As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep,
For their mother, may Heaven defend her!

4. The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then,
That night when the love yet unspoken.
Leaped up to his lips, — when low-murmured vows
Were pledged to be ever unbroken;

Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes,

He dashes off tears that are welling,

And gathers his gun closer up to its place,
As if to keep down the heart-swelling

5. He passes the fountain, the blasted pine-tree,
The footstep is lagging and weary;

Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light;
Toward the shades of the forest so dreary.

Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves?
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looked like a rifle: "Ha! Mary, good-by!"
And the life-blood is ebbing and plashing.

6. All quiet along the Potomac to-night,

No sound save the rush of the river;

-

While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead, –

The picket 's off duty forever.

THE brilliant poem "Teneriffe" was contributed to McMillan's Magazine by Frederick W. H. Myers.

Its best points

are here exhibited. Alabaster is sometimes red:

I. Atlantic islands, phantom fair,

Throned on the solitary seas,

Immersed in amethystine air,
Haunt of Hesperidés!

Farewell! I leave Maderia thus
Drowned in a sunset glorious,
The Holy Harbor fading far
Beneath a blaze of Cinnabar.

4. We watched adown that glade of fire
Celestial Iris floating free,

We saw the cloudlets keep in choir
Their dances on the sea;
The scarlet, huge, and quivering sun
Feared his due hour was overrun,
On us the last he blazed, and hurled
His glory on Columbus' world.

6. Then all is twilight; pile on pile

The scattered flocks of cloudland close,
An alabaster wall, erewhile

Much redder than the rose!

8. Oh fear not thou, whate'er befall

Thy transient individual breath,
Behold, thou knowest not at all

What kind of thing is Death;
And here indeed might Death be fair,
If Death be dying into air,

If souls evanished mix with thee,

Illumined heaven, eternal sea.

THOMAS OTWAY, the friend of Collins, died in a garret, where he was hiding from creditors. Hunger had as much to