MYRON B. BENTON. And grass that's standing is fodder scorched dry; (Pull all together!) August's a month that too far goes by. July is just in the nick of time! (Best weather, best weather;) The midsummer month is the golden prime For haycocks smelling of clover and thyme; (Strike all together!) July is just in the nick of time! Still hiss the scythes; Shudder the grasses' defenceless blades- And, as a phalanx of wild-geese streams, The mowers, each a step in advance Of his fellow, time their stroke with a glance And far through the meadow leads their course, MY STREAM. O, WELL I know what thou wast seeking long, And now thou'st found this shadowy repose, There is a concourse here of pleasant sights On silken fringe, peep down the grassy bank. 279 And round about the tree-tops clasp in love, In such a spot did Shelley love to sever All bonds of that harassing world which quite Too rudely elbowed him and ruffled ever The humming-bird wings that spun his spirit's flight; Here would have loved to lie long hours, softhushed, And set unnumbered paper boats to grope, As was his wont, where 'er a wavelet rushed With busy kisses round a dimpled slope, And spin that lunar-rainbow gossamer Which held our boyhood's fancy in its clear, Bright meshes woven about the tender brain; And as through sweet intoxicating pain, Strange realms with forms and light unearthly, led. O, Webutuck! from thee what coolness pressed, Perchance, the clear rose-petal film that wrapt And visions vanished like a morning haze. grace, And the deep sky a bluer glory hath. Midsummer months the richer harvests hold. O stream! the years as gently, silently, Drop in my heart as yon first leaf of gold Adorn its spiral path wings unto thee. THE SORROW. CAME to my door and entered, No holiday laughed in his eyes. Ah, chill was the greeting I gave him! The lone unwelcome guest Who broke on my thoughtless revels; And I said with bitter zest: Shall this wan, gloomy stranger Sit down in the banquet hall, Where my band of wild-hearted comrades Are holding festival? RODEN NOEL. HE Honorable Roden Noel is the youngest son of Courtes Noel, dar of Gainsborough, by his marriage with Lady Frances Jocelyn, daughter of the Earl of Roden. He is thus partly Irish; the Norman Jocelyns having got their Irish estates through a marriage with one of the Keltic Magennises. By birth and early association an aristocrat, and closely connected with the court, where his mother was Lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and he himself for several years groom of the Privy Chamber, Mr. Roden Noel is a democrat in the highest sense of the word; and no English poet has more passionately borne on life and song the brotherhood of man and the wrongs of the oppressed, especially the oppressed among children. He was educated partly at Harrow, and partly under a private tutor, the Rev. C. Harbin, whom he remembers with affectionate gratitude as one to whom he owes the development of his taste for philosophy and of his deep and passionate love for nature. The first great poet by whom he was influenced was Byron; and for him the younger poet has always retained an intense and sympathetic affection. Indeed there are resemblances between the two, personal as well as mental. Mr. Roden Noel has been much abroad, and is familiar with a great part of the continent; he has also spent some time in the East, the influence of which upon his work is very strongly marked. In 1863 he married Celice, daughter of Paul de Broe, and is the father of three children, two of whom are living, and the youngest of whom is commemorated in "A Little Child's Monument." The poetry of Roden Noel is the absolutely sincere utterance of a many-sided nature; and this sincerity is at least one cause, in the present writer's opinion, of its being so free from mannerism. He is philosopher and mystic, lover of nature and her interpreter; one open to all the influence of sensuous beauty; one, too, whose being says, "Oh! I have suffered with those that I saw suffer.” He is original and musical, possessing the not too common power of so fusing thought, sense and imagination, that a magnificent harmony is the result. Satire is in his hands a weapon which he knows how powerful to use for very noble ends. After having past through various phases of belief and doubt, traceable in his work, which has always been the spontaneous expression of his thought, Mr. Noel is a Christian in the broadest sense of the word, and a strong believer in the final triumph of right over wrong, as well as in the use of apparent wrong for the development of actual rights. Our poet's tastes are Catholic, with the exception that they exclude field sports on the grounds of humanitarianism and belief in the essential unity of all creation. He is an ardent lover of the sea, and a fearless swimmer. He is entirely free from cliquism. Poet he is through and through, but no mere "literary man," and his sympathy goes out to the men of action; to the doers, rather than the sayers; for, to use his own words, "Life is more than art." He loves a walk across country with one of his peasant friends, and he is thoroughly happy romping with children. His terrible indignation at the wrongs suffered by the children of the poor has not only expressed itself in his poetry, but has lent more than warmth to his interest in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and his sympathy has been shown in a most practical manner by his serving on the School Board, and by his getting up free dinners in connection with it. Oozy enchased live walls, where a sea-music rings? Do you remember the war our brown-winged arrowy vessel Waged with wind and tide, a foaming, billowy night, To a sound as of minute-guns, when gloomy hearts of the hollows With sullen pride rebuffed invading Ocean's might? Mr. Noel's prose writing is fine, and his critique noble and generous. His volume of "Essays of Poetry and Poets" mostly consists of lectures given by him to large audiences in Manchester and other important towns. It has been said that to hear him read poetry is the truest interpretation of it. There are, besides this book, many papers of his in the pages of the principal higher-class English magazines; these deal with various subjects, chiefly literary and philosophical. He has edited Spenser and Otway, and has in the press a life of How they wheel aloft lamenting, souls of the uluByron, in the "Great Writer's" series. Like most writers of marked individuality, Mr. Noel has had . to take his share of that dislike which falls to the Do you remember the Altarlet towers that front the cathedral, Dark and scarred sheer crag, flashed o'er by the wild sea-mews? lant tempest! And the lightning billows clash in the welter Odin brews! A sinister livid glare from under brows of the storm-sun! Brows of piled-up cloud, threatening grim Brechou, Bleaching to ghastly pale the turbulent trouble of water, While the ineffable burden of gray world o'er me grew! Yea, all the weary waste of cloud confused with the ocean Fell full-charged with doom on a foundering hu man heart. Our souls were moved asunder, away to an infinite distance, While all the love that warmed me waned, and will depart. Fiends of the whirlwind howl for a wild carousal of slaughter Of all that is holy and fair, so shrills the demon wail; Ruin of love and youth, with all we have deemed immortal! My child lies dead in the dark, and I begin to fail! Wonderful visions wane, tall towers of phantasy tumble; I shrink from the frown without me, there is no smile within; I cower by the fireless hearth of an uninhabited chamber, Alone with Desolation, and the dumb ghost of my sin. I have conversed with the aged; once their souls were a furnace; Now they are gleams in mouldered vaults of the memory; All the long sound of the Human wanes to wails of a shipwreck, Drowned in the terrible roar of violent sons of the sea! In the immense storm-chant of winds and waves of the sea! And if we have won some way in our weary toil to the summit, Do we not slidder ever back to the mouth of the pit? When I behold the random doom that engulfs the creature, I wonder, is the irony of God perchance in it? 'Tis a hideous spectacle to shake the sides of fiends with laughter, Where in the amphitheater of our red world they sit! Yea, and the rosiest Love in a songful heart of a lover, Child of Affinity, Joy, Occasion, beautiful May, May sour to a wrinkled Hate, may wear and wane to Indifference. Ah! Love, an' thou be mortal, all will soon go gray! O when our all on earth is wrecked on reefs of disaster, May the loud night that whelms be found indeed God's day! Our aims but half our own, we are drifted hither | and thither; The quarry so fiercely hunted rests unheeded now, And if we seized our bauble, it is fallen to ashes, But a fresh illusion haunts the ever-aching brow. Is the world a welter of dream, with ne'er an end, nor an issue, Or doth One weave Dark Night, with Morning's golden strand, To a Harmony with sure hand? Ah! for a vision of God! for a mighty grasp of the real, Feet based firm on granite in place of crumbling sand! Oh! to be face to face, and heart to heart with our dearest, Lost in mortal mists of the unrevealing land! Oh! were we disenthralled from casual moods of the outward, Slaves to the smile or frown of tyrant, mutable Time! Might we abide unmoved in central deeps of the Spirit, Where the mystic jewel Calm glows evermore sublime! The dizzying shows of the world, that fall and tumble to chaos, Dwell irradiate there in everlasting prime. But the innermost spirit of man, who is one with the Universal, Yearns to exhaust, to prove the immense of Experience, Explores, recedes, makes way, distills a food from a poison, From strife with Death wrings power, and sea soned confidence. O'er the awakening infant, drowsing eld, and the mindless, Their individual Spirit glows enthroned in Heaven, Albeit at dawn, or eve'n, or from confusion of cloudland, Earth of their full radiance may remain bereaven: Yea, under God's grand eyes all souls lie pure and shriven. Nay! friend beloved! remember purple robes of the cavern, And all the wonderful dyes in dusky halls of the sea, When a lucid lapse of the water lent thrills of ex quisite pleasure, A tangle of living lights all over us tenderly, When our stilly bark lay floating, or we were lipping the water, Breast to breast with the glowing, ardent heart of the deep! That was a lovelier hour, whispering hope to the spirit, Breathing a halcyon calm, that lulled despair to sleep; Fairy flowers of the ocean, opening innermost wonder, Kindle a rosy morn impearled in the water ways, |