strife,

The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!

But why, you ask me, should this tale be told

To men grown old, or who are growing old?
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Edipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his com-

peers,

When each had numbered more than four

score years,

And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had but begun his "Characters of Men." Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightin gales,

At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales; Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past.

These are indeed exceptions; but they show How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow

Into the arctic regions of our lives, Where little else than life itself survives.

As the barometer foretells the storm
While still the skies are clear, the weather
warm,

So something in us, as old age draws near,
Betrays the pressure of the atmosphere.
The nimble mercury, ere we are aware,
Descends the elastic ladder of the air;
The telltale blood in artery and vein
Sinks from its higher levels in the brain ;
Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent moon;
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon;
It is not strength, but weakness; not de-
sire,

But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire,

The burning and consuming element,
But that of ashes and of embers spent,

In which some living sparks we still discern, Enough to warm, but not enough to burn.

What then? Shall we sit idly down and

say

The night hath come; it is no longer day? The night hath not yet come; we are not quite

Cut off from labor by the failing light;
Something remains for us to do or dare;
Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear ;
Not Edipus Coloneus, or Greek Ode,
Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode
Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn,
But other something, would we but begin;
For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

The doors are all wide open; at the gate The blossomed lilacs counterfeit a blaze, And seem to warm the air; a dreamy haze

Hangs o'er the Brighton meadows like a fate,

And on their margin, with sea-tides elate, The flooded Charles, as in the happier days,

Writes the last letter of his name, and stays

His restless steps, as if compelled to wait. I also wait; but they will come no more, Those friends of mine, whose presence satisfied

The thirst and hunger of my heart. Ah me!

They have forgotten the pathway to my door!

Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled,

And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold

All its loose-flowing garments into one, Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun

Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold.

So in majestic cadence rise and fall

The mighty undulations of thy song, O sightless bard, England's Mæonides! And ever and anon, high over all

Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong,

Floods all the soul with its melodious

seas.

KEATS

THE young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;

The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!

The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold

To the red rising moon, and loud and deep

The nightingale is singing from the steep; It is midsummer, but the air is cold;

Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.

Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,

On which I read: "Here lieth one whose

name

Was writ in water." And was this the meed

Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write :

"The smoking flax before it burst to flame

Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."

THE GALAXY

TORRENT of light and river of the air, Along whose bed the glimmering stars

are seen

Like gold and silver sands in some ravine Where mountain streams have left their channels bare !

The Spaniard sees in thee the pathway, where

His patron saint descended in the sheen
Of his celestial armor, on serene

And quiet nights, when all the heavens
were fair.

Not this I see, nor yet the ancient fable Of Phaeton's wild course, that scorched the skies

Where'er the hoofs of his hot coursers trod;

But the white drift of worlds o'er chasms of sable,

The star-dust, that is whirled aloft and flies

From the invisible chariot-wheels of God.

THE SOUND OF THE SEA

THE sea awoke at midnight from its sleep, And round the pebbly beaches far and wide

I heard the first wave of the rising tide Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep; A voice out of the silence of the deep, A sound mysteriously multiplied

As of a cataract from the mountain's side,

Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep. So comes to us at times, from the unknown

And inaccessible solitudes of being,

The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul; And inspirations, that we deem our own, Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing

Of things beyond our reason or control.

O summer day beside the joyous sea!
O summer day so wonderful and white,
So full of gladness and so full of pain!
Forever and forever shalt thou be

To some the gravestone of a dead delight,
To some the landmark of a new domain.

THE TIDES

I SAW the long line of the vacant shore, The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand,

And the brown rocks left bare on every hand,

As if the ebbing tide would flow no more. Then heard I, more distinctly than before, The ocean breathe and its great breast expand,

And hurrying came on the defenceless land

The insurgent waters with tumultuous

roar.

All thought and feeling and desire, I said, Love, laughter, and the exultant joy of

song

Have ebbed from me forever! Suddenly o'er me

They swept again from their deep ocean bed, And in a tumult of delight, and strong As youth, and beautiful as youth, upbore

me.

A SHADOW

I SAID unto myself, if I were dead,
What would befall these children?
What would be

Their fate, who now are looking up to me
For help and furtherance? Their lives,
I said,

Would be a volume wherein I have read
But the first chapters, and no longer see
To read the rest of their dear history,
So full of beauty and so full of dread.
Be comforted; the world is very old,

And generations pass, as they have passed,

A troop of shadows moving with the sun; Thousands of times has the old tale been

A NAMELESS GRAVE

A newspaper description of a burying ground in Newport News, where, on the head-board of a soldier were the words," A Union Soldier mustered out," was sent to Mr. Longfellow in 1864. Ten years passed before the poet used the incident, for he wrote the sonnet November 30, 1874.

"A SOLDIER of the Union mustered out," Is the inscription on an unknown grave At Newport News, beside the salt-sea

wave,

Nameless and dateless; sentinel or scout Shot down in skirmish, or disastrous rout Of battle, when the loud artillery drave Its iron wedges through the ranks of brave

And doomed battalions, storming the redoubt.

Thou unknown hero sleeping by the sea In thy forgotten grave! with secret shame

I feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn, When I remember thou hast given for

me

All that thou hadst, thy life, thy very

name,

And I can give thee nothing in return.

SLEEP

LULL me to sleep, ye winds, whose fitful sound

Seems from some faint Eolian harpstring caught;

Seal up the hundred wakeful eyes of thought

As Hermes with his lyre in sleep pro

found

The hundred wakeful eyes of Argus bound; For I am weary, and am overwrought With too much toil, with too much care distraught,

And with the iron crown of anguish crowned.

Lay thy soft hand upon my brow and cheek,

O peaceful Sleep! until from pain released

I breathe again uninterrupted breath! with what subtle meaning did the Greek

Ah,

Call thee the lesser mystery at the feast Whereof the greater mystery is death!