Puslapio vaizdai
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A SECOND BALLAD OF

ANTIQUARIES

RIENDS that we know not,"-late we said.

"FRIE

We know you now, true friends, who still, Where'er Time's tireless scythe has led,

Have wrought with us through good and illHave toiled the weary sheaves to fill. Hail then, O known and tried !—and you, Who know us not to-day, but will— Hail to you all, Old Friends and New!

With no scant store our barns are fed :
The full sacks bulge by door and sill,
With grain the threshing-floors are spread,
The piled grist feeds the humming mill;
And-but for you-all this were nil,
A harvest of lean ears and few,

But for your service, friends, and skill;
Hail to you all, Old Friends and New!

But hark!

Is that the Reaper's tread? Come, let us glean once more until Here, where the snowdrop lifts its head, The days bring round the daffodil ;

Till winds the last June roses kill, And Autumn fades; till, 'neath the yew, Once more we cry, with Winter chill, Hail to you all, Old Friends and New!

ENVOY.

Come! Unto all a horn we spill,

Brimmed with a foaming Yule-tide brew, Hail to you all, by vale and hill!Hail to you all, Old Friends and New!

NOTES

NOTES

THI

COLLECTED POEMS.-TITLE.

HIS volume is the outcome of half-a-dozen predecessors, the earliest of which was published by Messrs. Henry S. King & Co., in October, 1873. It was called Vignettes in Rhyme and Vers de Société (now first collected), i.e. from different magazines; and it was dedicated to Anthony Trollope, the original Editor of St. Paul's, to which periodical many of the pieces had been contributed. It reached a second edition in 1874, and a third in 1875. In May, 1877, it was followed by Proverbs in Porcelain and other Verses, a fresh in-gathering, also issued by Messrs. King. A second edition of this appeared in 1878, the residue of which was destroyed by a fire. In 1880, Vignettes in Rhyme and other Verses, a selection for the most part from these two books, was published at New York by Messrs. Henry Holt & Co., with a Dedication to Oliver Wendell Holmes and an Introduction by Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman. In 1883 (by which date the two English collections named above were no longer obtainable) this American selection of 1880, newly arranged, was reprinted in London by Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. (Messrs. King's successors) as Old-World Idylls; while in 1885 a second volume, entitled At the Sign of the Lyre, and mainly composed of later pieces, made its appearance both at London and New York. Besides these, and some illustrated selections, was issued in 1895 a two-volume edition of both (Poems on Several Occasions), comprising a portrait of the author by Mr. William Strang, and seven etchings by M. Adolphe Lalauze. Of this, however, which again contained

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