Silent streets and vacant halls,
Ruined roofs and towers and walls;
Hidden from all mortal eyes
Deep the sunken city lies:
Even cities have their graves!

This is an enchanted land! Round the headlands far away Sweeps the blue Salernian bay With its sickle of white sand: Further still and furthermost On the dim discovered coast Pæstum with its ruins lies, And its roses all in bloom Seem to tinge the fatal skies Of that lonely land of doom.

On his terrace, high in air,
Nothing doth the good monk care
For such worldly themes as these.
From the garden just below
Little puffs of perfume blow,
And a sound is in his ears
Of the murmur of the bees
In the shining chestnut-trees;
Nothing else he heeds or hears.
All the landscape seems to swoon
In the happy afternoon;
Slowly o'er his senses creep
The encroaching waves of sleep,
And he sinks as sank the town,
Unresisting, fathoms down,
Into caverns cool and deep!

Walled about with drifts of snow,
Hearing the fierce north-wind blow,
Seeing all the landscape white,
And the river cased in ice,
Comes this memory of delight,
Comes this vision unto me
Of a long-lost Paradise

In the land beyond the sea.

THE SERMON OF ST. FRANCIS.

UP soared the lark into the air,
A shaft of song, a winged prayer,
As if a soul, released from pain,
Were flying back to heaven again.

St. Francis heard; it was to him
An emblem of the Seraphim;
The upward motion of the fire,
The light, the heat, the heart's desire.

Around Assisi's convent gate

The birds, God's poor who cannot wait,' From moor and mere and darksome wood Came flocking for their dole of food.

"O brother birds," St. Francis said,
"Ye come to me and ask for bread,
But not with bread alone to-day
Shall ye be fed and sent away.

"Ye shall be fed, ye happy birds,
With manna of celestial words;
Not mine, though mine they seem to be,
Not mine, though they be spoken through

me.

"O, doubly are ye bound to praise
The great Creator in your lays;
He giveth you your plumes of down,
Your crimson hoods, your cloaks of brown.

"He giveth you your wings to fly
And breathe a purer air on high,
And careth for you everywhere,
Who for yourselves so little care !"

With flutter of swift wings and songs
Together rose the feathered throngs,
And singing scattered far apart;
Deep peace was in St. Francis' heart.

He knew not if the brotherhood
His homily had understood;
He only knew that to one ear
The meaning of his words was clear.

BELISARIUS.

I AM poor and old and blind;
The sun burns me, and the wind
Blows through the city gate
And covers me with dust
From the wheels of the august
Justinian the Great.

It was for him I chased

The Persians o'er wild and waste,
As General of the East;
Night after night I lay
In their camps of yesterday;
Their forage was my feast.

For him, with sails of red, And torches at mast-head, Piloting the great fleet,

And say good night, for now the western skies

Are red with sunset, and gray mists arise

Like damps that gather on a dead man's face.

Good night! good night! as we so oft have said

Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days

That are no more, and shall no more return.

Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed;

I stay a little longer, as one stays
To cover up the embers that still burn.

And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,

Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark

Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;

He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,

Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read

I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every

page

Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.

V.

THE doors are all wide open; at the

gate

SHAKESPEARE.

blaze,

And seem to warm the air; a dreamy

Those friends of mine, whose presence
satisfied

The thirst and hunger of my heart.
Ah me!

They have forgotten the pathway to my door!

Something is gone from nature since they died,

And summer is not summer, nor can be.

CHAUCER.

AN old man in a lodge within a park; The chamber walls depicted all around

With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound.

With human life in endless overflow; Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets

gold

To the red rising moon, and loud and deep

The nightingale is singing from the steep; It is midsummer, but the air is cold; Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.

Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,

On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name

Was writ in water." And was this the meed

Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write :

"The smoking flax before it burst to flame Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."

THE GALAXY.

TORRENT of light and river of the air, Along whose bed the glimmering stars

are seen

Like gold and silver sands in some ravine

Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!

THE SOUND OF THE SEA.

THE sea awoke at midnight from its sleep, And round the pebbly beaches far and wide

I heard the first wave of the rising tide Rush onward with uninterrupted

where

O summer day so wonderful and white,