Puslapio vaizdai
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Nor a smile to hear in the orchard close

The blackbird's song,

When the boughs are flushing faintly to rose,

And April days are long,

And the world is white with the hawthorn

snows.

O long the way, but there comes a rest
At sweet Eventide!

When the wild glad birds have flown to the nest,
O the radiance, mild and wide,

The fair pale lights that wake in the west!

There bloometh many a kindly flower
In the churchyard grass;

The silver feet of a summer shower
Will linger ere they pass;

"Hic Jacet" glimmers at evening hour.

While one shall sleep, nor hearken o'erhead
To birds in May;

And on the heart where Pain lieth dead
The tired hands rest alway,
Surely a dream shall be perfected.

Alas! that a human heart should break
For such as this,

Just from a bright false dream to wake,
For the loss of a phantom kiss.
Christ keeps us all for His pity's sake!

WANDERERS.

Aн, my beloved! my best is all your due
Always my love, and faith, and loyalty.
And in your gain so very poor am I,

What marvel that my thoughts, grown recreant too,
Should seek a happier resting-place with you!
Leaving a wintry heart and waning sky,
Flying across the world as swallows fly
To a new summer, and new skies of blue.
I wonder will you know them when they come,
Fanning your face and hair with homeless wings,
Drifting in some grey storm-hour to your breast!
Ah! will you take them with glad murmurings,
And stroke the wet wings, faint with wind and
foam,

And lay them in your heart, and bid them rest?

THE DEAD MOTHER.

I HAD been buried a month and a year,

The clods on my coffin were heavy and brown, The wreaths at my headstone were withered sere, No feet came now from the little town; I was forgotten, six months or more, And a new bride walked on my husband's floor.

Below the dew and the grass-blades lying,
On All Souls' Night, when the moon is cold,
I heard the sound of my children crying,

And my hands relaxed from their quiet fold; Through mould and death-damp it pierced my heart,

And I woke in the dark with a sudden start.

I cast the coffin-lid off my face,

From mouth and eyelids I thrust the clay, And I stood upright from the sleeper's place,

And down through the graveyard I took my way. The frost on the rank grass shimmered like snow, And the ghostly graves stood white in a row.

As I went down through the little town

The kindly neighbors seemed sore afeard,
For Lenchen plucked at the cross in her gown,
And Hans said, "Jesu," under his beard,
And many a lonely wayfarer
Crossed himself, with a muttered prayer.

I signed the holy sign on my brows,
And kissed the crucifix hid in my shroud,
As I reached the door of my husband's house
The children's clamor rose wild and loud;
And swiftly I came to the upper floor,
And oped, in the moonlight, the nursery door.
No lamp or fire in the icy room;

'Twas cold, as cold as my bed in the sod. My two boys fought in that ghostly gloom For a mildewed crust that a mouse had gnawed; "Oh, mother, mother!" my Gretchen said, We have been hungry since you were dead."

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FRANKLIN EVERT DENTON.

F

'RANKLIN EVERT DENTON was born on November 22, 1859, in Chardon, the countyseat of Geauga County, Ohio, a village of the Western Reserve. He is of pure American stock that dates back to the days of the Colonies. By inheritance and by early training he was a boy of strong literary instincts. At seven years of age he was perched upon a box before a compositor's case learning the mysteries of type-setting. This was in the office of the Geauga Republican, a weekly publication in his native village, and his connection with the paper, thus early begun, continued, with occasional intervals of schooling, for eighteen years. In 1884 he entered into the employ of the Geauga Leader, published in Burton, Ohio, acting for some time as its editor and manager. He removed to Cleveland in 1887 and joined the staff of The Ohio Sun and Voice, with which paper he still remains.

The uneventful tenor of the young poet's life in a quiet village has left a lasting impression upon the trend of his imagination, and his literary taste. He filled the lack of routine schooling with persistent efforts at self-education, and the book that he studied most was the open book of Nature. He was a zealous reader, but not an omnivorous one. His selections were of the highest and most useful standards, and though he read much his remarkable memory gave him ample time for thorough mental digestion. He wrote verses at an early age, but it was not until his eighteenth year that he considered his poetical efforts worthy of publication. Encouraged by admiring friends, in 1883 he gathered his poems together and published them in book form. The volume met with much of mingled criticism and praise. It was the work of a youth whose circumscribed surroundings made commonplaces seem of large moment; it showed crudities of thought, yet from every page the true poetic soul was shining out. In the same year that he published his book he received a prize from the Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette for the best story submitted to that paper. It was a metaphysical tale entitled "The Glass Dwarf" and attracted much attention at the time of publicaion.

Mr. Denton's poems and stories have appeared in many periodicals and been much copied. He has written but little for publication during the last two years, devoting most of his limited leisure time to disciplining his powers for future work in his chosen field, a field which he persists in occupying whatever the result. His poetical ideals are of the highest class, and to them he has determined to adapt himself rather than to any so-called popular taste. W. R. R.

THE SOUTH WIND.

WHEN maples drip their arteries of sweet
That fires distill to amber honey; when
The swollen brook is noisy in the glen,
And robins, hopping o'er the brown earth, greet
The gentle dawn with song; when snows retreat
To fence and forest nook, and high again
The soft clouds sail the sunny heaven-then
The South Wind comes with hope and life replete.
It knows the grave of every flower that sleeps,
And wakes each little Lazarus. It dyes

The dawn a fairer purple than of Tyre,
And spills the cloudy cisterns of the skies.
It lifts the heart like verse, but how it sweeps
The chords of memory's pathetic lyre!

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The eyes of the Median mother are dried,

And the Spartan maid's heart has forgotten its pride;

The Kings and the Kingdoms have sought their dark beds,

And the ages file over the low-lying heads; But those dead heroes live, and they camp, and they fight,

Wherever the fettered arise in their might;

The mountains may crumble, the ocean may dry, But the good of a deed that is great cannot die.

The spirit, like ivy, thrives best in the cold,
Where all that it clings to is ruin and mold.

It is well that we sink in the Lethean wave;
The glory of life is the gloom of the grave;
The background of storm, the perspective of
grief,

Give the figure of man its heroic relief;

Were it not for death's shadow o'er land and o'er

sea,

No better than angels the righteous would be.

ALARIC.

LIKE the flakes of the snow in their Scythian home,

Swept Alaric's Visigoths down upon Rome;
The city of Cæsar lay low at his feet,

And he was the sickle and Europe the wheat.
But there yet was a foe for this Northman to
meet,

Who rode a pale horse and who knew not defeat; They met on the shore of the blue southern sea, And humbly the conqueror bended his knee.

A river was turned from its course, and the dead Was laid in a grave that was dug in its bed; There, shrouded in trophies and pillowed with spoils,

The mourning host left him to rest from his toils, But the river they turned to its course as of old, They slaughtered the slaves who had hollowed

the mold,

So none but the taciturn stars as they rise
Can point to the spot where the great captain lies.

And what if the place of his sleep is unknown?
'Tis the little who need a memorial stone.
A pillar he cut from the quarries of worth,
So lofty its shadow encircles the earth;

A monument hewn from the granite of deeds,
To which moss never clings, on which time never
feeds.

Ah, naught is more true than what Pericles said, All the world is the shaft of the great who are dead.

IT IS WELL.

IT is well that we sink in the Lethean wave,
That the lamp is blown out at the door of the

cave;

Our chance to be strong and our chance to be great

Is the darkness and doubt that hang over our fate;

NIGHT.

SELF-AWED with its own glory is the night.
Yon moon looks down with passionless aken
Upon the Union's sleepless youth, as when
The Pyramids rose new upon her sight,
Or Amos of Tekoa, by her light,

Guarded his flocks, the while Jehovah's pen
Wrote on his heart the message unto men,
Whose characters divine he read aright.
The lover longs to be alone with her

Who is the shrine where kneels his heart, and he,

Who is of Nature ardent worshipper,

Would in her presence unattended be; Would to her lips of inspiration list, With midnight's starry arbor for a tryst.

OCTOBER.

ALL day, like smiles that wreathe an old man's face,

Whose seasons have been spent in doing good,
Upon the garnered field and naked wood
The sun has shed a soft and solemn grace;
But now the night is drawing on apace,
And saturnine and sinister the mood
Of formless shadows that already brood
Upon the landscape from the depths of space.
Along the west the day's last tinge is dim;
The slender crescent of the sinking moon
Follows the stars over the horizon's rim,
Like Ruth the reapers through the sultry noon;
But, be it glorious or be it grim,

The world is in the mighty arms of Him.

QUATRAIN.

BE there a traitor who deserves in sooth The keen axe of the headsman, it is he, Who hath committed treason unto the Celestial visions of his vanished youth.

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