OLIVER BASSELIN.

Never feeling of unrest

Broke the pleasant dream he dreamed; Only made to be his nest,

All the lovely valley seemed;

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But his rhymes

Found other chimes,

Nearer to the earth than they.

Gone are all the barons bold,

Gone are all the knights and squires, Gone the abbot stern and cold,

And the brotherhood of friars;

Not a name

Remains to fame,

From those mouldering days of old!

But the poet's memory here

Of the landscape makes a part; Like the river, swift and clear, Flows his song through many a heart; Haunting still

That ancient mill,

In the Valley of the Vire.

OTHERE, the old sea-captain,

Who dwelt in Helgoland,

To King Alfred, the Lover of Truth,
Brought a snow-white walrus-tooth,

Which he held in his brown right hand.

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His figure was tall and stately,
Like a boy's his eye appeared;
His hair was yellow as hay,
But threads of a silvery gray
Gleamed in his tawny beard.

Hearty and hale was Othere,

His cheek had the colour of oak; With a kind of laugh in his speech,

Like the sea-tide on a beach,

As unto the King he spoke.

And Alfred, King of the Saxons,
Had a book upon his knees,
And wrote down the wondrous tale
Of him who was first to sail
Into the Arctic seas.

"So far I live to the northward,
No man lives north of me;
To the east are wild mountain-chains,
And beyond them meres and plains ;
To the westward all is sea.

"So far I live to the northward,

From the harbour of Skeringes-hale,

If you only sailed by day,

With a fair wind all the way,

More than a month would you sail.

"I own six hundred reindeer,

With sheep and swine beside; I have tribute from the Finns, Whalebone and reindeer-skins, And ropes of walrus-hide.

THE DISCOVERER OF THE NORTH CAPE.

"I ploughed the land with horses,

But my heart was ill at ease,

For the old seafaring men

Came to me now and then,

With their sagas of the seas;

"Of Iceland and of Greenland,
And the stormy Hebrides,
And the undiscovered deep;―
I could not eat nor sleep

For thinking of those seas.

"To the northward stretched the desert, How far I fain would know;

So at last I sallied forth,

And three days sailed due north,
As far as the whale-ships go.

"To the west of me was the ocean, To the right the desolate shore,

But I did not slacken sail

For the walrus or the whale,

Till after three days more.

The days grew longer and longer,
Till they became as one,

And southward through the haze
I saw the sullen blaze

Of the red midnight sun.

· And then uprose before me,
Upon the water's edge,
The huge and haggard shape
Of that unknown North Cape,
Whose form is like a wedge.

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