Each dear familiar place it lay,— The violet-tinted mystic haze; And there had lain, hour after hour, Through the long, sweet, mid-summer days; While we, in all its splendor clad, In Tyrian dyes right royally, Its perfect grace and mystery. SONG. J. W. Chadwick. E sail toward evening's lonely star, WE That trembles in the tender blue; One single cloud, a dusky bar, Burnt with dull carmine through and through, The soft breeze freshens; leaps the spray Lighthouses kindle far and near, Wave-cradled thus, and wind-caressed. How like a dream are earth and heaven, AGAIN! Thy face, pale in the shadowy even, Thou dearest! we are at life's best, Wave-cradled thus and wind-caressed. 171 Celia Thaxter. AGAIN? OH, sweet and fair! Oh, rich and rare! That day so long ago. The autumn sunshine everywhere, The heather all aglow, The ferns were clad in cloth of gold, Such suns will shine, such waves will sing Oh, fit and few! Oh, tried and true! And so in earnest play The hours flew past, until at last One day again, no cloud of pain And yet we strove in vain, in vain, To conjure up the past; Like, but unlike, -the sun that shone, For ghosts unseen crept in between, And marred our harmony. "The past is ours, not yours," they said: "The waves that beat the shore, Though like the same, are not the same, Oh, never, never more!" H SONG. Anon. OW many times do I love thee, dear? Of a new-fallen year, Whose white and sable hours appear How many times do I love again? Tell me how many beads there are Of evening rain Unravelled from the tumbling main And threading the eye of a yellow star : So many times do I love again. Thomas L. Beddoes. THE WHITE BIRCH. 173 TH NATURE'S TEACHINGS. HE fountains mingle with the river, The winds of heaven mix forever Nothing in the world is single, See the mountains kiss high heaven And the sunlight clasps the earth, THE WHITE BIRCH. Shelley. `HOU art the go-between of rustic lovers ; TH Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping; Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience, And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keepJ. R. Lowell. ing. SMA THE BROOK RHINE. MALL current of the wilds afar from men, Changing and sudden as a baby's mood; Now a green babbling rivulet in the wood, Now loitering broad and shallow through the glen, Or threading 'mid the naked shoals, and then Brattling against the stones, half mist, half flood, Between the mountains where the storm-clouds brood: And each change but to wake or sleep again ; Bears the deep-laden vessels to the sea; Far hence wide waters feed the vines and corn; Pass on, small stream, to so great purpose born, On to the distant toil, the distant rest. Augusta Webster. THE RIVER'S END. OUT the majestic river floated on, BUT Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste, |