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Then up and spake the eldest daugh- And 't was easy to buy the gems and

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"That you will give me the first, first | And the first Leaf, when it was

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The King's head dropt upon his breast And the second Leaf sang: "But in

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Then Walter took from next his heart | And the third Leaf sang, "Be mine! A packet small and thin,

"Now give you this to the Princess Anne,

The Singing Leaves are therein."

III.

As the King rode in at his castle-gate,
A maiden to meet him ran,
And "Welcome, father!" she laughed
and cried

Together, the Princess Anne.

"Lo, here the Singing Leaves," quoth he,

"And woe, She took the packet, and the smile

but they cost me dear!"

Deepened down beneath the tear.

Be mine!"

And ever it sang, "Be mine!"

Then sweeter it sang and ever sweeter, And said, "I am thine, thine, thine!"

At the first Leaf she grew pale enough,
At the second she turned aside,
At the third, 't was as if a lily
flushed

With a rose's red heart's tide.

"Good counsel gave the bird," said she,

"I have my hope thrice o'er, For they sing to my very heart," she said,

"And it sings to them evermore."

It deepened down till it reached her She brought to him her beauty and

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I look and long, then haste me home, Still master of my secret rare;

Behind the hill, behind the sky,

Behind my inmost thought, he sings; No feet avail; to hear it nigh,

The song itself must lend the wings.

Sing on, sweet bird, close hid, and raise

Those angel stairways in my brain, That climb from these low-vaulted days

To spacious sunshines far from pain.

Sing when thou wilt, enchantment fleet,

I leave thy covert haunt untrod, And envy Science not her feat

To make a twice-told tale of God.

Once tried, the path would end in They said the fairies tript no more,

Rome,

But now it leads me everywhere.

Forever to the new it guides,

From former good, old overmuch; What Nature for her poets hides, 'T is wiser to divine than clutch.

The bird I list hath never come

Within the scope of mortal ear; My prying step would make him dumb,

And the fair tree, his shelter, sear.

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And long ago that Pan was dead; 'T was but that fools preferred to bore Earth's rind inch-deep for truth instead.

Pan leaps and pipes all summer long, The fairies dance each full-mooned

night,

Would we but doff our lenses strong, And trust our wiser eyes' delight.

City of Elf-land, just without Our seeing, marvel ever new,

Glimpsed in fair weather, a sweet | Those fountained courts, those cham

doubt

Sketched-in, mirage-like, on the blue.

I build thee in yon sunset cloud, Whose edge allures to climb the height;

I hear thy drowned bells, inly-loud, From still pools dusk with dreams of night.

Thy gates are shut to hardiest will, Thy countersign of long - lost speech,

bers still,

Fronting Time's far East, who shall reach?

I know not, and will never pry,

But trust our human heart for all; Wonders that from the seeker fly Into an open sense may fall.

Hide in thine own soul, and surprise

The password of the unwary elves; Seek it, thou canst not bribe their spies;

Unsought, they whisper it themselves.

THE MORAL IN DON QUIXOTE.

THERE is a moral in "Don Quixote," and a very profound one, whether Cervantes consciously put it there or not, and it is this: that whoever quarrels with the Nature of Things, wittingly or unwittingly, is certain to get the worst of it. The great difficulty lies in finding out what the Nature of Things really and perdurably is, and the great wisdom, after we have made this discovery, or persuaded ourselves that we have made it, is in accommodating our lives and actions to it as best we may or can. And yet, though all this be true, there is another and deeper moral in the book than this. The pathos which underlies its seemingly farcical turmoil, the tears which sometimes tremble under our lids after its most poignant touches of humor, the sympathy with its hero which survives all his most ludicrous defeats and humiliations and is only deepened by them, the feeling that he is after all the one noble and heroic figure in a world incapable of comprehending him, and to whose inhabitants he is distorted and caricatured by the crooked panes in those windows of custom and convention through which they see him, all this seems to hint that only he who has the imagination to conceive and the courage to attempt a trial of strength with what foists itself on our senses as the Order of Nature for the time being can achieve great results or kindle the coöperative and efficient enthusiasm of his fellow-men. The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next. How exalted was Don Quixote's own conception of his mission is clear from what is said of his first sight of the inn (Part. Prim. cap. iii.), that "it was as if he had seen a star which guided him not to the portals, but to the fortress of his redemption," where the allusion were too daring were he not persuaded that he is going forth to redeem the world. Cervantes, of course, is not so much speaking in his own person, as telling what passed in the mind of his hero. - Don Quixote.

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