THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY. | Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances.

"COME forth!" my catbird calls to me,
"And hear me sing a cavatina
That, in this old familiar tree,

Shall hang a garden of Alcina.
"These buttercups shall brim with wine
Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic ;
May not New England be divine?

My ode to ripening summer classic? "Or, if to me you will not hark,

By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing Till all the alder-coverts dark

Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing.

"Come out beneath the unmastered sky,

With its emancipating spaces,
And learn to sing as well as I,

Without premeditated graces.
"What boot your many-volumed gains,
Those withered leaves forever turning,
To win, at best, for all your pains,

A nature mummy-wrapt in learning?

"The leaves wherein true wisdom lies On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,

Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

"Come out! with me the oriole cries,

Escape the demon that pursues you! And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise,

Still hiding, farther onward wooes you."

"Alas, dear friend, that, all my days, Has poured from that syringa thicket The quaintly discontinuous lays

To which I hold a season-ticket,

"A season-ticket cheaply bought

With a dessert of pilfered berries,
And who so oft my soul hast caught
With morn and evening voluntaries,
"Deem me not faithless, if all day
Among my dusty books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June to play
With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.

"A bird is singing in my brain

"I ask no ampler skies than those
His magic music rears above me,
No falser friends, no truer foes,

And does not Doña Clara love me?

"Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars,
A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing,
Then silence deep with breathless stars,
And overhead a white hand flashing.

"O music of all moods and climes,

Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly, Where still, between the Christian chimes,

The moorish cymbal tinkles faintly!

"O life borne lightly in the hand,

For friend or foe with grace Castilian! O valley safe in Fancy's land,

Not tramped to mud yet by the million!

"Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale To his, my singer of all weathers, My Calderon, my nightingale,

My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.

"Ah, friend, these singers dead so long,

And still, God knows, in purgatory,
Give its best sweetness to all song,
To Nature's self her better glory."

IN THE TWILIGHT.

MEN say the sullen instrument,
That, from the Master's bow,
With pangs of joy or woe,
Feels music's soul through every fibre
sent,

Whispers the ravished strings
More than he knew or meant;

Old summers in its memory glow;
The secrets of the wind it sings;
It hears the April-loosened springs;
And mixes with its mood
All it dreamed when it stood
In the murmurous pine-wood
Long ago!

And bubbling o'er with mingled fan- The magical moonlight then

cies,

Steeped every bough and cone;

The roar of the brook in the glen

Came dim from the distance blown;
The wind through its glooms sang low,
And it swayed to and fro
With delight as it stood,
In the wonderful wood,
Long ago!

O my life, have we not had seasons
That only said, Live and rejoice?
That asked not for causes and reasons,

But made us all feeling and voice? When we went with the winds in their blowing,

When Nature and we were peers, And we seemed to share in the flowing Of the inexhaustible years?

Have we not from the earth drawn
juices

Too fine for earth's sordid uses?
Have I heard, have I seen

All I feel and I know?

Doth my heart overween?
Or could it have been
Long ago?

Sometimes a breath floats by me,
An odor from Dreamland sent,
That makes the ghost seem nigh me
Of a splendor that came and went,
Of a life lived somewhere, I know not
In what diviner sphere,

Of memories that stay not and go not,
Like music heard once by an ear

That cannot forget or reclaim it,
A something so shy, it would shame

it

To make it a show,

THE FOOT-PATH.

Ir mounts athwart the windy hill

Through sallow slopes of upland bare,
And Fancy climbs with foot-fall still
Its narrowing curves that end in air.

By day, a warmer-hearted blue

Stoops softly to that topmost swell; Its thread-like windings seem a clew To gracious climes where all is well.

By night, far yonder, I surmise

An ampler world than clips my ken,
Where the great stars of happier skies
Commingle nobler fates of men.

I look and long, then haste me home,
Still master of my secret rare;
Once tried, the path would end in 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.

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,

A something too vague, could I That climb from these low-vaulted days

name it,

For others to know,

As if I had lived it or dreamed it,
As if I had acted or schemed it,
Long ago!

And yet, could I live it over,

This life that stirs in my brain, Could I be both maiden and lover, Moon and tide, bee and clover,

As I seem to have been, once again,
Could I but speak and show it,

This pleasure more sharp than pain,
That baffles and lures me so,
The world should not lack a poet,
Such as it had

In the ages glad,
Long ago!