Thy dear, life-imaging, close sympathy.

What but my hopes shot upwards e'er so bright?

What but my fortunes sank so low in night?

Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,

Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?

Was thy existence then too fanciful For our life's common light, who are so dull?

Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold

With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?

Well, we are safe and strong; for now we sit

Beside a hearth where no dim sha dows flit;

Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire

Warms feet and hands, nor does to

more aspire;

By whose compact, utilitarian heap, The present may sit down and go to sleep,

Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,

And with us by the unequal light of the old wood-fire talked. E. S. H.

GIVE ME THE OLD.

I.

OLD wine to drink!

Ay, give the slippery juice That drippeth from the grape thrown loose

Within the tun;

Plucked from beneath the cliff
Of sunny-sided Teneriffe,

And ripened 'neath the blink

Of India's sun!

Peat whiskey hot,

Tempered with well-boiled water! These make the long night shorter, Forgetting not

Good stout old English porter.

II.

Old wood to burn!

Ay, bring the hillside beech

From where the owlets meet and screech,

And ravens croak;

The crackling pine, and cedar sweet; Bring too a clump of fragrant peat, Dug 'neath the fern;

The knotted oak, A fagot too, perhap, Whose bright flame, dancing, winking,

Shall light us at our drinking;

While the oozing sap

Shall make sweet music to our think

ing.

III.

Old books to read!

Ay, bring those nodes of wit, The brazen-clasped, the vellum-writ, Time-honored tomes!

The same my sire scanned before, The same my grandsire thumbèd o'er, The same his sire from college bore,

The well-earned meed

Of Oxford's domes: Old Homer blind, Old Horace, rake Anacreon, by Old Tully, Plautus, Terence lie; Mort Arthur's olden minstrelsie, Quaint Burton, quainter Spenser, ay! And Gervase Markham's venerieNor leave behind

The Holy Book by which we live and die.

IV.

Old friends to talk!

Ay, bring those chosen few, The wise, the courtly, and the true, So rarely found;

Him for my wine, him for my stud,
Him for my easel, distich, bud

In mountain walk!
Bring Walter good:

With soulful Fred; and learned Will,
And thee, my alter ego, (dearer still
For every mood).

R. H. MESSINGER.

TO A CHILD.

I WOULD that thou might always be As innocent as now,

That time might ever leave as free
Thy yet unwritten brow.

I would life were all poetry
To gentle measure set,

That nought but chastened melody
Might stain thine eye of jet,
Nor one discordant note be spoken,
Till God the cunning harp had broken.
I fear thy gentle loveliness,
Thy witching tone and air,
Thine eye's beseeching earnestness
May be to thee a snare.

The silver stars may purely shine,
The waters taintless flow;

But they who kneel at woman's

shrine

Breathe on it as they bow.

N. P. WILLIS.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR.

BETWEEN the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to

lower,

Comes a pause in the day's occupations

That is known as the children's

hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,

Descending the broad hall-stair,

And still with favor singled out, Marred less than man by mortal fall,

Her disposition is devout,
Her countenance angelical.

No faithless thought her instinct shrouds,

But fancy checkers settled sense, Like alteration of the clouds

On noonday's azure permanence. Pure courtesy, composure, ease, Declare affections nobly fixed, And impulse sprung from due degrees

Of sense and spirit sweetly mixed. Her modesty, her chiefest grace, The cestus clasping Venus' side, Is potent to deject the face

Of him who would affront its pride. Wrong dares not in her presence speak,

Nor spotted thought its taint disclose

Under the protest of a cheek

Outbragging Nature's boast, the

rose.

In mind and manners how discreet!
How artless in her very art!
How candid in discourse! how sweet
The concord of her lips and heart!

Than any other planet in Heaven,
The moone, or the starres seven,
For all the world, so had she
Surmounten them all of beauty,
Of manner, and of comeliness,
Of stature, and of well set gladnesse,
Of goodly heed, and so well besey,1-
Shortly what shall I more say,
By God, and by his holowes twelve,
It was my sweet, right all herselve.
She had so stedfast countenance
In noble port and maintenance,
And Love that well harde my bone3
Had espied me thus soone,
That she full soone in my thought
As, help me God, so was I caught
So suddenly that I ne took
No manner counsel but at her look,
And at my heart for why her eyen
So gladly I trow mine heart, seyen
That purely then mine own thought
Said, 'Twere better to serve her for
nought

Than with another to be well.

I saw her dance so comely,
Carol and sing so swetely,
Laugh and play so womanly,
And look so debonairly,

So goodly speak, and so friendly,
That certes I trow that evermore
N'as seen so blissful a treasore,
For every hair on her head,
Sooth to say, it was not red,
Nor neither yellow nor brown it n'as,
Methought most like gold it was,
And such eyen my lady had,
Debonnaire, good, glad, and sad,
Simple, of good mokel, not too wide,
Thereto her look was not aside,
Nor overt whart, but beset so well
It drew and took up every dell.
All that on her 'gan behold
Her eyen seemed anon she would
Have mercy,-folly wenden 5 so,
But it was never the rather do.
It was no counterfeited thing
It was her own pure looking
That the goddess Dame Nature
Had made them open by measure
And close; for, were she never sc

glad