BUGLE SONG.

THE splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, further going;
O sweet and far, from cliff and scar,

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow forever and forever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

TENNYSON.

CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE.

HALF a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of death

Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said.
Into the valley of Death,

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!" Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldiers knew

Some one had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of death,
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them,

Volleyed and thundered:

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well:

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell,

Rode the six hundred.

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air,
Sab'ring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while

All the world wondered:

Plunged in the battery smoke, Right through the line they broke:

Cossack and Russian

Reeled from the sabre-stroke,

Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back but not,

Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them,

Volleyed and thundered:

Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well,
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
Oh, the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

TENNYSON.

DEDICATION OF GETTYSBURG CEMETERY.

FOURSCORE and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who have given their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract. The world will very little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here, to the unfinished work they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remain

ing before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN.

THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin his control

Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,

When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals;
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power when they were free
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:

- not so thou,

Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play-
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

Calm or convulsed- in breeze or gale or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark heaving;- boundless, endless, and sublime The image of Eternity — the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee: thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbies, onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror, 'twas a pleasing fear;
For I was, as it were, a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane

as I do here.

BYRON.