"Here is wealth for your life,-if you will but ask;

Here is health for your limb, without lint or lotion;

Here is all that you lack, in this tiny flask; And the price is a couple of silver groschen!

"Buy,-who'll buy?" So the tale runs on: And still in the Great World's market-places The Quack, with his quack catholicon,

Finds ever his crowd of upturned faces;

For he plays on our hearts with his pipe and drum, On our vague regret, on our weary yearning; For he sells the thing that never can come,

Or the thing that has vanished, past returning.

A FANCY FROM FONTENELLE

"De mémoires de Roses on n'a point vu mourir le Jardinier."

"HE Rose in the garden slipped her bud,

THE

And she laughed in the pride of her youthful blood,

As she thought of the Gardener standing by"He is old,—so old! And he soon must die!"

The full Rose waxed in the warm June air,

And she spread and spread till her heart lay bare; And she laughed once more as she heard his tread

"He is older now! He will soon be dead!"

But the breeze of the morning blew, and found That the leaves of the blown Rose strewed the

ground;

And he came at noon, that Gardener old,
And he raked them gently under the mould.

And I wove the thing to a random rhyme,
For the Rose is Beauty, the Gardener, Time.

DON QUIXOTE

BEHIND thy pasteboard, on thy battered hack,

Thy lean cheek striped with plaster to and
fro,

Thy long spear levelled at the unseen foe,
And doubtful Sancho trudging at thy back,
Thou wert a figure strange enough, good lack!
To make wiseacredom, both high and low,
Rub purblind eyes, and (having watched thee go)
Dispatch its Dogberrys upon thy track:
Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest!
Yet would to-day when Courtesy grows chill,
And life's fine loyalties are turned to jest,
Some fire of thine might burn within us still!
Ah, would but one might lay his lance in rest,
And charge in earnest. were it but a mill!

THE

A BROKEN SWORD

(TO A. L.)

'HE shopman shambled from the doorway out And twitched it down

Snapped in the blade! 'Twas scarcely dear, I doubt,

At half-a-crown.

Useless enough! And yet can still be seen,
In letters clear,

Traced on the metal's rusty damaskeen—
"Pour Paruenyr."

Whose was it once?-Who manned it once in hope His fate to gain ?

Who was it dreamed his oyster-world should ope To this-in vain ?

Maybe with some stout Argonaut it sailed
The Western Seas;
Maybe but to some paltry Nym availed
For toasting cheese!

Or decked by Beauty on some morning lawn
With silken knot,

Perchance, ere night, for Church and King 'twas drawn

Perchance 'twas not!

Who knows-or cares? To-day, 'mid foils and gloves

Its hilt depends,

Flanked by the favours of forgotten loves,-
Remembered friends;—

And oft its legend lends, in hours of stress,
A word to aid;

Or like a warning comes, in puffed success,
Its broken blade.