MORE SEA.

Living our lives out day by day,
All unconscious of listening ear,
Singing our song as we go our way,

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Do we know who may be leaning to hear?
Anna C. Brackett.

THINK

MORE SEA.

HINK thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die. Outstretched in the sun's warmth upon the shore,

Thou say'st" Man's measured path is all gone

o'er :

Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh,
Man clomb until he touched the truth; and I,

Even I, am he whom it was destined for."

How should this be? Art thou then so much more Than they who sowed, that thou shouldst reap thereby?

Nay, come up hither. From this wave-washed mound
Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me ;
Then reach on with thy thought till it be drowned.
Miles and miles distant though the last line be,
And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues be-
yond,-

Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more.

sea.

D. G. Rossetti.

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S

HOMER.

MUCH have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne :
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold :
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats.

A

PATMOS.

LL around him Patmos lies,
Who hath spirit-gifted eyes,
Who his happy sight can suit
To the great and the minute.
Doubt not but he holds in view
A new earth and heaven new;
Doubt not but his ear doth catch
Strains nor voice nor reed can match;

Many a silver, sphery note

Shall within his hearing float.

PATMOS.

All around him Patmos lies,
Who unto God's priestess flies :
Thou, O nature, bid him see,
Through all guises worn by thee,
A divine apocalypse.
Manifold his fellowships :

Now the rocks their archives ope;
Voiceless creatures tell their hope
In a language symbol-wrought;
Groves to him sigh out their thought;
Musings of the flower and grass
Through his quiet spirit pass.

'Twixt new earth and heaven new
He hath traced and holds the clew.
Number his delights ye may not;
Fleets the year, but these decay not.
Now the freshets of the rain,
Bounding on from hill to plain,
Show him earthly streams have rise
In the bosom of the skies.
Now he feels the morning thrill,
As upmounts, unseen and still,
Dew the wing of evening drops.
Now the frost, that meets and stops
Summer's feet in tender sward,
Greets him breathing heavenward.
Hieroglyphics writes the snow,
Through the silence falling slow;
Types of star and petaled bloom
A white missal-page illume.

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By these floating symbols fine,
Heaven-truth shall he divine.

All around him Patmos lies,
Who hath spirit-gifted eyes ;
He need not far remove,

He need not the times reprove,
Who would hold perpetual lease
Of an isle in seas of peace.

Edith Thomas.

EVERY age,

MOUNT ATHOS.

Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned

By those who have not lived past it.

We'll suppose

Mount Athos carved, as Alexander schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man.

The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little as the browsing goats
Of form or feature of humanity

Up there, in fact, had travelled five miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them,
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso,-hand, that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down

To all the country pastures.

'Tis even thus

With times we live in,-evermore too great

To be apprehended near.

Mrs. Browning.

IT

THE RIVER OF TIME.

BY THE SEA.

T is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity.

The gentleness of heaven is on the sea;
Listen! the mighty being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder-everlastingly.

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Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine :

Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year,
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

Wordsworth.

THE RIVER OF TIME.

HIS tract which the River of Time

Now flows through with us, is the Plain.

Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.

Border'd by cities and hoarse

With a thousand cries is its stream.

And we on its breast, our minds

Are confus'd as the cries which we hear,

Changing and short as the sights which we see.

And we say that repose has fled

Forever the course of the River of Time.