Though thou give me thy coat of mail

Of softest leather made,

With choicest steel inlaid ;

All this cannot prevail.

"What right have thou, O Khan,

To me, who am my own?

Who am slave to God alone,

And not to any man.

"God will appoint the day

When I again shall be

By the blue, shallow sea,

Where the steel-bright sturgeons play.

"When I wander lonely and lost

In the wind; when I watch at night,

Like a hungry wolf, and am white

And covered with hoar-frost ;

"Yea, wheresoever I be,

In the yellow desert sands,

In mountains, or unknown lands,

Allah will care for me."

III.

Then Sobra, the old, old man-
Three hundred and sixty years
Had he lived in this land of tears-
Bowed down, and said: "O Khan!

“If you bid me I will speak,
There's no sap in dry grass,
No marrow in dry bones! alas,
The mind of old men is weak!

"I am old, I am very old;
I have seen the primeval man,

I have seen the great Gingis Khan
Arrayed in his robes of gold.

"What I say to you is the truth;
And I say to you, O Khan,

Pursue not the star-white man,
Pursue not the beautiful youth.

"Him the Almighty made;
He brought him forth of the light
At the verge and end of the night,
When men on the mountain prayed.

"He was born at the break of day, When abroad the angels walk ;

He hath listened to their talk,

And he knoweth what they say.

"Gifted with Allah's grace,

Like the moon of Ramazan

When it shines in the skies, O Khan,
Is the light of his beautiful face.

"When first on the earth he trod,
The first words that he said

Were these, as he stood and prayed

'There is no God but God!'

"And he shall be King of men,
For Allah hath heard his prayer,
And the Archangel in the air,
Gabriel, hath said, Amen!"

MONTE CASSINO.

BEAUTIFUL valley, through whose verdant meads
Unheard the Garigliano glides along,-

The Liris, nurse of rushes and of reeds,
The river taciturn of classic song!

The Land of Labour, and the Land of Rest,
Where medieval towns are white on all

The hill-sides, and where every mountain crest Is an Etrurian or a Roman wall!

There is Alagna, where Pope Boniface

Was dragged with contumely from his throne. Sciarra Colonna, was that day's disgrace

The Pontiff's only, or in part thine own?

There is Ceprano, where a renegade

Was each Apulian, as great Dante saith, When Manfred, by his men-at-arms betrayed, Spurred on to Benevento and to death.

There is Aquinum, the old Volscian town
Where Juvenal was born, whose lurid light
Still hovers o'er his birthplace, like the crown
Of splendour over cities seen at night.

Doubled the splendour is, that in its streets

The Angelic Doctor as a school-boy played, And dreamed perhaps the dreams that he repeats In ponderous folios for scholastics made.

And there, uplifted like a passing cloud
That pauses on a mountain summit high,
Monte Cassino's convent rears its proud

And venerable walls against the sky.

Well I remember how on foot I climbed

The stony pathway leading to its gate:

Above, the convent bells for vespers chimed;
Below, the darkening town grew desolate.

Well I remember the low arch and dark,

The court-yard with its well, the terrace wide, From which, far down, diminished to a park, The valley veiled in mist was dim descried.

The day was dying, and with feeble hands Caressed the mountain-tops; the vales between Darkened; the river in the meadow-lands Sheathed itself as a sword and was not seen.

The silence of the place was like a sleep,

So full of rest it seemed; each passing tread Was a reverberation from the deep

Recesses of the

ages that are dead.

For more than thirteen centuries ago

Benedict, fleeing from the gates of Rome, A youth disgusted with its vice and woe, Sought in these mountain solitudes a home.

He founded here his Convent and his Rule

Of prayer and work, and counted work as prayer.

His pen became a clarion, and his school

Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air.

What though Boccaccio, in his reckless way
Mocking the lazy brotherhood, deplores