DEATH OF QUEEN MERCEDES.

HERS all that Earth could promise or bestow,

Youth, Beauty, Love, a crown, the beckoning years,

Lids never wet, unless with joyous tears, A life remote from every sordid woe, And by a nation's swelled to lordlier flow.

What lurking-place, thought we, for doubts or fears,

When, the day's swan, she swam along the cheers

Of the Alcalá, five happy months ago? The guns were shouting Io Hymen then That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom;

The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men

To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb. Grim jest of fate! Yet who dare call it

UNDER THE OCTOBER MAPLES.

WHAT mean these banners spread,
These paths with royal red
So gaily carpeted?
Comes there a prince to-day?
Such footing were too fine
For feet less argentine
Than Dian's own or thine,
Queen whom my tides obey.

Surely for thee are meant
These hues so orient
That with a sultan's tent
Each tree invites the sun;
Our Earth such homage pays,
So decks her dusty ways,
And keeps such holidays,
For one, and only one.

My brain shapes form and face,
Throbs with the rhythmic grace
And cadence of her pace
To all fine instincts true;
Her footsteps, as they pass,
Than moonbeams over grass
Fall lighter, and, alas,
More insubstantial too!

Perfect! and all this to waste On a gray beard's palsied taste! Poets so their verses write, Heap them full of life and light, And then fling them to the rude Mumbling of the multitude. Not so dire her fate as theirs, Since her friend this gift declares Choicest of his birthday boons, Eleanor's dear macaroons! February 22, 1884.

TELEPATHY.

"AND how could you dream of meeting?"

Nay, how can you ask me, sweet? All day my pulse had been beating The tune of your coming feet.

And as nearer and ever nearer

I felt the throb of your tread,
To be in the world grew dearer,
And my blood ran rosier red.

Love called, and I could not linger,
But sought the forbidden tryst,
As music follows the finger

Of the dreaming lutanist.

And though you had said it and said it, "We must not be happy to-day," Was I not wiser to credit

The fire in my feet than your Nay?

SCHERZO.

WHEN the down is on the chin
And the gold-gleam in the hair,
When the birds their sweethearts win
And champagne is in the air,
Love is here, and Love is there,
Love is welcome everywhere.

Summer's cheek too soon turns thin,
Days grow briefer, sunshine rare;
Autumn from his cannekin
Blows the froth to chase Despair:
Love is met with frosty stare,
Cannot house 'neath branches bare.

When new life is in the leaf
And new red is in the rose,
Though Love's Maytime be as brief
As a dragon-fly's repose,
Never moments come like those,
Be they Heaven or Hell: who knows?

All too soon comes Winter's grief,
Spendthrift Love's false friends turn foes;
Softly comes Old Age, the thief,
Steals the rapture, leaves the throes:
Love his mantle round him throws, -
"Time to say Good-bye; it snows."

"FRANCISCUS DE VERULAMIO SIC COGITAVIT."

THAT's a rather bold speech, my Lord Bacon,

For, indeed, is 't so easy to know

When next upon the page I chance,
Like Poussin's nymphs my pulses dance,
And whirl my fancy where it sees
Pan piping 'neath Arcadian trees,
Whose leaves no winter-scenes rehearse,
Still young and glad as Homer's verse.
"What mean," I ask, "these sudden
joys?

This feeling fresher than a boy's?
What makes this line, familiar long,
New as the first bird's April song?
I could, with sense illumined thus,
Clear doubtful texts in Eschylus!'

Laughing, one day she gave the key,
My riddle's open-sesame;

Then added, with a smile demure,
Whose downcast lids veiled triumph

He thought, no doubt, "Those flashes

grand,

That light for leagues the shuddering sky,

Are made, a fool could understand,
By some superior kind of fly.

"He's of our race's elder branch His family-arms the same as ours, Both born the twy-forked flame to launch,

Of kindred, if unequal, powers."

And is man wiser? Man who takes
His consciousness the law to be
Of all beyond his ken, and makes
God but a bigger kind of Me?

SCIENCE AND POETRY.

HE who first stretched his nerves of subtile wire

Over the land and through the sea-depths still,

Thought only of the flame-winged mes

senger

As a dull drudge that should encircle

earth

With sordid messages of Trade, and tame Blithe Ariel to a bagman. But the Muse Not long will be defrauded. From her foe

Her misused wand she snatches; at a touch,

The Age of Wonder is renewed again, And to our disenchanted day restores The Shoes of Swiftness that give odds to Thought,

The Cloak that makes invisible; and with these

I glide, an airy fire, from shore to shore, Or from my Cambridge whisper to Cathay.

A NEW YEAR'S GREETING.

THE century numbers fourscore years;
You, fortressed in your teens,
To Time's alarums close your ears,
And, while he devastates your peers,
Conceive not what he means.

If e'er life's winter fleck with snow
Your hair's deep shadowed bowers,
That winsome head an art would know
To make it charm, and wear it so
As 't were a wreath of flowers.

If to such fairies years must come,
May yours fall soft and slow
As, shaken by a bee's low hum,
The rose-leaves waver, sweetly dumb,
Down to their mates below!

THE DISCOVERY.

I WATCHED a moorland torrent run
Down through the rift itself had ma
Golden as honey in the sun,
Of darkest amber in the shade.