OUR LITTLE QUEEN. COULD you have seen the violets Could you have kissed that golden hair, You would have been her tiring-maid As joyfully as I,— Content to dress your little queen, And let the world go by. Could you have seen those violets snow; Hide in their graves of Drawn all that gold along your hand While she lay smiling so; O, you would tread this weary earth As heavily as I ! Content to clasp her little grave, And let the world go by. THE CHANGELING. I HAD a little daughter, Overland Monthly. I know not how others saw her, And the light of the heaven she came from To what can I liken her smiling How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids, Till her outstretched hands smiled also, And I almost seemed to see The very heart of her mother Sending sun through her veins to me! She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth, But loosed the hampering strings, But they left in her stead a changeling, That seems like her bud in full blossom, And smiles as she never smiled: When I wake in the morning, I see it Where she always used to lie, All the wonders of faithful Nature Winds wander, and dews drip earthward, Earth whirls, and all but to prosper This child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bless it upon my breast; Yet it lies in my little one's cradle, And the light of the heaven she's gone to, - James Russell Lowell. DEATH OF AN INFANT. A HOST of angels flying, Through cloudless skies impelled, A pearl of beauty lying, In heaven's vast halls of light. They saw, with glances tender, O'er whom life's earliest morn 'Twas whispered one morning in heaven He of the key and bar "O angel, sweet angel! I pray you, Set the beautiful gates ajar, Only a little, I pray you, Set the beautiful gates ajar! "I can hear my mother weeping; |