Even fetters for the body Were but bands of sand, and vain In the long still hours of darkness, I can gather flowers of rhyme And with all their fresh dew freighted, T. B. READ. THE SINGERS. CHERRY-BLOSSOM nested Lifting heart and wing; Comes the time of berries, They will sing no more ; Happy in their store; In the time of cherries thrushes sing no more. WM. SAWYER. SEEKING THE MAY-FLOWER. 61 SEEKING THE MAY-FLOWER. THE sweetest sound our whole year round- The song of the full orchard choir Glad sights are common nature draws To me, when in the sudden Spring The veil is parted wide, and lo, A moment, though my eyelids close, Once more I see that wooded hill Where the arbutus grows. I see the village Dryad kneel, Fresh blows the breeze through hemlock-trees, Hark, from the moss-clung apple-bough, I heard it, ay, and heard it not,— Nor thought thereafter, year by year, That with its joy belong. E. C. STEDMAN. OLD AND NEW. I WATCHED a storm-hued ocean flash and change; It was the farewell twilight of the year, Lo, on the dark waves as on stone they trod ! A massive helmet gleamed from either head, And either was in stature like a god, Either a shape to dread. 63 THE BEST. And both were clad in warrior-mail, and bore One spirit's face was as the face of Him Who knows the world's full depths of woe and crime: The other's face was youthful as the morn, And radiant with divinest hope. Then past A wrack of gloomier cloud my dream was borne, But later, just at midnight, when the clocks Heard-was it the dull boom from shore-land rocks, EDGAR FAWCETT. THE BEST. BETTER to dwell with lowly things, Born of such stillness, wells the brook, In leafy closet dim ;' Till the full silence of the nook O'erflows into a hymn. The little singer trips along, But ever gains a fuller song, Gladly it spends its tuneful grace Nor asks, as yet, a wider space, In simple silence thrives its heart :— It feels the spotted fishes dart, Till slipping down by hillside farms, And in the meadow's circling arms, White lilies anchor on its breast, For in its tasks it knows no haste, But bears it on to out-stretched lands, And then, at length, it understands |