102

THE LETTERS OF MY YOUTH.

THE LETTERS OF MY YOUTH.

LOOK at the leaves I gather up in trembling-
Little to see, and sere, and time-bewasted,
But they are other than the tree can bear now,
For they are mine!

Deep as the tumult in an archèd sea-cave,
Out of the Past these antiquated voices
Fall on my heart's ear; I must listen to them,
For they are mine!

Whose is this hand that wheresoe'er it wanders,
Traces in light words thoughts that come as lightly?
Who was the king of all this soul-dominion?
I? Was it mine?

With what a healthful appetite of spirit
Sits he at Life's inevitable banquet,
Tasting delight in everything before him!
Could this be mine?

See how he twists his coronals of fancy
Out of all blossoms, knowing not the poison-
How his young eye is meshed in the enchantment!
And it was mine!

ONE YEAR AGO.

What, is this I?-this miserable complex
Losing and gaining, only knit together
By the ever-bursting fibres of remembrance-
What is this mine?

Surely we are by feeling as by knowing-
Changing our hearts our being changes with them;
Take them away-these spectres of my boyhood;
They are not mine.

103

Lord Houghton.

ONE YEAR AGO.

ONE year ago my path was green,
My footstep light, my brow serene;
Alas! and could it have been so
One year ago?

There is a love that is to last

When the hot days of youth are past:
Such love did a sweet maid bestow
One year ago.

I took a leaflet from her braid
And gave it to another maid.

Love! broken should have been thy bow

One year ago.

Walter Savage Landor.

104

THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE.

THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE.

"TEARS, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

"Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

“Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

"Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!"
A. Tennyson.

A WIDOW bird sate mourning for her Love
Upon a wintry bough;

The frozen wind crept on above,

The freezing stream below.

There was no leaf upon the forest bare,

No flower upon the ground,

And little motion in the air

Except the mill-wheel's sound.

P. B. Shelley.

DESERTED.

YE banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fair!
How can ye chant, ye little birds,

And I sae fu' o' care!

Thou'll break my heart, thou bonnie bird

That sings upon the bough;

Thou minds me o' the happy days

When my fau'se Luve was true.

Thou'll break my heart, thou bonnie bird
That sings beside thy mate;

For sae I sat, and sae I sang,
And wist na o' my fate.

HOLLOW is the oak beside the sunny waters drooping; Thither came, when I was young, happy children trooping; Dream I now, or hear I now-far, their mellow whooping!

Gay below the cowslip bank, see the billow dances;
There I lay, beguiling time-when I liv'd romances;
Dropping pebbles in the wave, fancies into fancies;—

Farther, where the river glides by the wooded cover, Where the merlin singeth low, with the hawk above her, Came a foot and shone a smile-woe is me, the Lover!

Leaflets on the hollow oak still as greenly quiver;
Musical amid the reeds murmurs on the river;
But the footstep and the smile?—woe is me for ever!
Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton.