As children frightened by a thunder- | But they were stone, their hearts within way, Paused, and observed the spot, and marked it well, Whereon the shadow of the finger fell; And, coming back at midnight, delved, and found A secret stairway leading under ground. Down this he passed into a spacious hall, Lit by a flaming jewel on the wall; Upon its forehead, like a coronet, "That which I am, I am; my fatal aim None can escape, not even yon luminous flame! clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelf Tempts from his books and from his nobler self. Midway the hall was a fair table placed, The scholar and the world! The endWith cloth of gold, and golden cups en chased With rubies, and the plates and knives were gold, And gold the bread and viands manifold. Around it, silent, motionless, and sad, Were seated gallant knights in armor clad, less strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books; The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain ! And ladies beautiful with plume and But why, you ask me, should this tale be zone, told To men grown old, or who are growing | Sinks from its higher levels in the brain ; old! It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpi tate. Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Edipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years, And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had but begun his Characters of Men Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales, At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales; Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past. These are indeed exceptions; but they show How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow Into the arctic regions of our lives, Where little else than life itself survives. As the barometer foretells the storm While still the skies are clear, the weather warm, So something in us, as old age draws near, Betrays the pressure of the atmosphere. The nimble mercury, ere we are aware, Descends the elastic ladder of the air; The telltale blood in artery and vein Whatever poet, orator, or sage noon : It is not strength, but weakness; not desire, But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire, The burning and consuming element, But that of ashes and of embers spent, In which some living sparks we still discern, Enough to warm, but not enough to burn. What then? Shall we sit idly down and say The night hath come; it is no longer day? The night hath not yet come; we are not quite Cut off from labor by the failing light; For age is opportunity no less And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. I fear no more the dust and heat, Let others traverse sea and land,' From them learn whatever lies CADENABBIA. LAKE OF COMO. No sound of wheels or hoof-beat breaks As by the loveliest of all lakes I pace the leafy colonnade Where level branches of the plane At times a sudden rush of air By Somariva's garden gate I make the marble stairs my seat, And hear the water, as I wait, Lapping the steps beneath my feet. The undulation sinks and swells Along the stony parapets, And far away the floating bells Tinkle upon the fisher's nets. Silent and slow, by tower and town The freighted barges come and go, Their pendent shadows gliding down By town and tower submerged below. The hills sweep upward from the shore, With villas scattered one by one Upon their wooded spurs, and lower Bellaggio blazing in the sun. And dimly seen, a tangled mass Of walls and woods, of light and shade, What though Boccaccio, in his reckless | Where, amid her mulberry-trees Gray mists were rolling, rising, vanishing; The woodlands glistened with their jewelled crowns; Far off the mellow bells began to ring For matins in the half-awakened towns. The conflict of the Present and the Past, The ideal and the actual in our life, As on a field of battle held me fast, Where this world and the next world were at strife. For, as the valley from its sleep awoke, I saw the iron horses of the steam Toss to the morning air their plumes smoke, of Sits Amalfi in the heat, Bathing ever her white feet In the tideless summer seas. In the middle of the town, 'T is a stairway, not a street, Dooms them to this life of toil? Lord of vineyards and of lands, Looking down upon the scene Where are now the freighted barks Vanished like a fleet of cloud, |