The Garden Seat.

"A thousand fantasies

Begin to throng into my memory,

Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dim,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names."

MILTON.

"In him the pure well-head of Poesy did dwell."-SPENSER.

ON the stone seat reclined, with half-closed eyes,
O wizard Fancy! wave awhile

Let

me,

Thy magic wand: Lo! what a shadowy file

Of forms repeople these thick shades: the wise,
The noble, and the beautiful, arise,

Each in his different age's garb and style:

Shorn crown, plum'd hat, cowl'd frown, mustachio'd

smile;

Ruffler, and priest, and knight, in motley guise;

Names known in British story: sages nurst

In these gray college-halls-from the throng far,
Stands one in meditative mood sublime,

Chaucer,* of English song the morning star,
Dreaming some tale or allegoric burst,

("The Flower and Leaf" perchance) of early rhyme.

*Those who favour the supposition that Chaucer was educated at Oxford, in preference to Cambridge, fix Merton as his college, probably because his friends Occleve and Strove were there.

"What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelment of lead and brass; its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spake of moderate pleasures not protracted after sunset, of temperance and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the old world. Adam could scarce have missed it in paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet flowers and plants to spring by; for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by; for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd carved it out quaintly in the sun' and turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones."-CHARLES LAMB.

WHAT was the magic, gray and time-worn stone,
Drew me so often to reflect on thee,

With gaze half vacant, dream-like reverie;
While the long shadow, on thy surface thrown,
Crept on unmark'd? was it thy golden zone
Graven with figures mystical: thy face

Mingling deep shade and sunshine: thy green base
With mosses stain'd, and lichens overgrown?

Or did I see in thee Time's shrine, whereon

The mighty Moments priest-like offering cast,
Daily to the irrevocable Gone;

The Present sacrificing to the Past?

Or was it that thou told'st me to repent?

Say, of the buried Hours still monument !

Shadows of Pre-Existence.

Κατ ̓ ἔκεινον γε τὸν λόγον, ὦ Σώκρατες, εἰ ἀλήθης ἔστιν ὅν σὺ εἴωθας θαμὰ λεγεῖν, ὅτι μάθησις οὐκ ἀλλὸ τι ἡ ἀνάμνησις τυγχάνει οὖσα, καὶ κατὰ τοῦτον ἀνάγκη ποὺ ἡμας ἐν προτερῷ τίνι χρονῷ μεμαθήκεναι ἃ νῦν ἀναμιμνησκόμεθα, τοῦτο δε ἀδύνατον εἰ μὴ ᾖν ποῦ ἡμων ἥ ψύχη πρὶν ἐν τῷδε τῷ ἀνθρωπινῷ εἴδει γένεσθαι.—PHÆDO.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home."-WORDSWORTH.

SAY, have you never felt a conscious start
At some chance passing act, or trivial speech;
And question'd memory in vain, to teach

The when, and where, we took the selfsame part
In word or deed; on us it seems to dart
So all familiar; yet, when we would reach
Forward, or to conjúre it, or beseech,
It fades like ghost of necromantic art?
Such passage comes and goeth like the wind,

We know not whence or whither leaving the mind
Full of sweet doubt and strange perplexity—

Is it a glimpse of the Soul's former plight,

Seen faint but fair, as patch of moonlit sky, Caught through the driving rack on gusty night?

The Rookery.

"Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood."-SHAKSPEARE.

DARK plumag'd commonwealth! for ages past,
Without a fear of ruthless boy to spoil

The callow brood, pledge of joint love and toil,
Or of the silent bolt from cross-bow cast,

High on ancestral trees secure and fast

Hath rock'd thy city free; contented they

Who from these halls and groves have pass'd away,

To hear thy citizens above the blast

In winter; and to watch in busy Spring
Thy noisy workmen their old seats repair
With plastic labour wonderful; to trace
Thy home-bound columns cluster thick in air;
And at the close of day, with circling grace,
Wheel round the chapel tower on easy wing.

The Grassplot.

"Round his bald head the brown leaves drift amain."

VAIN, aged gard'ner, is thy toil to clear

The lawn, which while its hue and smoothness vied
With bright green velvet, 'twas thy simple pride
To keep unsullied through the earlier year;

But now,
fast fall the leaves, wither'd and sere ;-
Hark! how they crackle in the autumnal breeze,
That strips them countless from their parent trees:—
Still on the grass they lie; then sudden rear

Their shrivell'd forms, and whirl in witch-like dance!

Mocking thy threat'ning broom and tardy pace, Two truant children seek, with merry glance,

*

The laden barrow hid in shelter'd place.
Alas old man, for all thy morning's care;
The loosen'd leaves fly spinning in the air.

*The children of the Warden of Merton.