The bright scenes of my youth, — all gone out now.

How eagerly its flickering blaze doth catch

On every point now wrapped in time's deep shade!

Into what wild grotesqueness by its flash

And fitful checkering is the picture made!

When I am glad or gay,

Let me walk forth into the brilliant

sun,

And with congenial rays be shone upon:

When I am sad, or thought-bewitched would be,

Let me glide forth in moonlight's mystery,

But never, while I live this changeful life,

This past and future with all wonders rife,

Never, bright flame, may be denied

to me

Thy dear, life-imaging, close sympathy.

What but my hopes shot upwards e'er so bright?

What but my fortunes sank so low in night?

Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,

Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?

Was thy existence then too fanciful For our life's common light, who are so dull ?

Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold

With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?

Well, we are safe and strong; for now we sit

Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit;

Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire

Warms feet and hands, nor does to more aspire;

By whose compact, utilitarian heap, The present may sit down and go to sleep,

Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,

And with us by the unequal light of the old wood-fire talked. E. S. H.

GIVE ME THE OLD.

I.

OLD wine to drink!

Ay, give the slippery juice

That drippeth from the grape thrown loose

Within the tun;

Plucked from beneath the cliff
Of sunny-sided Teneriffe,

And ripened 'neath the blink

Of India's sun!

Peat whiskey hot,

Tempered with well-boiled water! These make the long night shorter, Forgetting not

Good stout old English porter.

II.

Old wood to burn!

Ay, bring the hillside beech From where the owlets meet and screech,

And ravens croak;

The crackling pine, and cedar sweet; Bring too a clump of fragrant peat, Dug 'neath the fern;

The knotted oak, A fagot too, perhap, Whose bright flame, dancing, winking,

Shall light us at our drinking;

While the oozing sap

Shall make sweet music to our think

ing.

III.

Old books to read!

Ay, bring those nodes of wit, The brazen-clasped, the vellumn-writ, Time-honored tomes!

The same my sire scanned before,
The same my grandsire thumbed o ́er,
The same his sire from college bore,
The well-earned meed

Of Oxford's domes:
Old Homer blind,

Old Horace, rake Anacreon, by
Old Tully, Plautus, Terence lie;
Mort Arthur's olden minstrelsie,
Quaint Burton, quainter Spenser, ay!
And Gervase Markham's venerie -

Nor leave behind

The Holy Book by which we live and die.

IV.

Old friends to talk!

Ay, bring those chosen few, The wise, the courtly, and the true, So rarely found;

Him for my wine, him for my stud, Him for my easel, distich, bud

In mountain walk!

Bring Walter good:

With soulful Fred; and learned Will, And thee, my alter ego, (dearer still For every mood).

R. H. MESSINGER.

TO A CHILD.

I WOULD that thou might always be As innocent as now,

That time might ever leave as free
Thy yet unwritten brow.

I would life were all poetry
To gentle measure set,

That nought but chastened melody
Might stain thine eye of jet,

Nor one discordant note be spoken,
Till God the cunning harp had broken.
I fear thy gentle loveliness,
Thy witching tone and air,
Thine eye's beseeching earnestness
May be to thee a snare.

The silver stars may purely shine,
The waters taintless flow;

But they who kneel at woman's
shrine

Breathe on it as they bow.

N. P. WILLIS.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR.

BETWEEN the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to

lower,

Comes a pause in the day's occupations

That is known as the children's hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,

Descending the broad hall-stair,