And now with love's repentant tears

I come once more on bended knee, Lamenting for the long, long years, The wasted years afar from Thee.

THE OLIVE STAR.

It sheds its gentle ray,

Night and day,

Above the spot where my beloved dwells;
It gleams, in festal hours,

'Mid incense, light, and flowers,

The swell of organs and the chime of bells.

When hushed the organ's tone,

And aisles are lone,

And waxen tapers fade, it grows not dim,-
But through the solemn night

It burns most clear and bright,

Shedding its constant light alone for Him.

Ever before the ark

It shines, to mark

His presence, to this faith my spirit clings,

As once of old, a star

Brought wise men from afar

Unto the cradle of the King of Kings.

And thus, believing heart,

Frail as thou art,

Before thy day is spent,-thy night-lamps trim:
Kindle a burning fire

Of love and pure desire,

And on its flames aspire to dwell with Him.

THE WAY OF THE CROSS.

We may scatter our couch with roses,

And sleep through the summer day, But the soul that in sloth reposes

Is not in the narrow way.

If we follow the chart that is given,
We never need be at a loss;

For the only way to heaven

Is the royal way of the Cross.

To him who is reared in splendor
The Cross is a heavy load;

And the feet that are soft and tender

Will shrink from the thorny road; But the bonds of the soul must be riven, And gold must be held as dross;

For the only way to heaven

Is the royal way of the Cross.

We say we will walk to-morrow
The path we refuse to-day,
And still with our lukewarm sorrow
We shrink from the narrow way.

What heeded the chosen eleven

How the fortunes of life might toss, As they followed their Master to heaven By the royal way of the Cross.

W.D. Howells.

BEFORE THE GATE.

They gave the whole long day to idle laughter,
To fitful song and jest,

To moods of soberness as idle, after,

And silences, as idle too as the rest.

But when at last upon their way returning,

Taciturn, late, and loath,

Through the broad meadow in the sunset burning,

They reached the gate, one sweet spell hindered them both.

Her heart was troubled with a subtile anguish

Such as but women know

That wait, and lest love speak or speak not languish,
And what they would, would rather they would not so;

Till he said,-man-like nothing comprehending

Of all the wondrous guile

That women won win themselves with, and bending
Eyes of relentless asking on her the while,-

"And I might open it!" His voice, affrighted At its own daring, faltered under his breath.

Then she-whom both his faith and fear enchanted

Far beyond words to tell,

Feeling her woman's finest wit had wanted

The art he had that knew to blunder so well

Shyly drew near, a little step, and mocking,
"Shall we not be too late

"For tea?" she said. "I'm quite worn out with walking:

"Yes, thanks, your arm.

And will you-open the gate ?"

THE FIRST CRICKET.

Ah me! is it then true that the year has waxed into waning, And that so soon must remain nothing but lapse and decay,— Earliest cricket, that out of the midsummer midnight complaining,

All the faint summer in me takest with subtle dismay?

Though thou bringest no dream of frost to the flowers that slumber,

Though no tree for its leaves, doomed of thy voice, maketh

moan;

With the unconscious earth's boded evil my soul thou dost

cumber,

And in the year's lost youth makest me still lose my own.

Answerest thou, that when nights of December are blackest and bleakest,

And when the fervid grate feigns me a May in my room, And by my hearthstone gray, as now sad in my garden, thou

creakest,

Thou wilt again give me all,-dew and fragrance and bloom?

Nay, little poet! full many a cricket I have that is willing,
If I but take him down out of his place on my shelf,
Me blither lays to sing than the blithest known to thy shrilling,
Full of the rapture of life, May, morn, hope, and—himself :

Leaving me only the sadder; for never one of my singers

Lures back the bee to his feast, calls back the bird to his tree. Hast thou no art can make me believe, while the summer yet

lingers,

Better than bloom that has been red leaf and sere that must be?

IN EARLIEST SPRING.

Tossing his mane of snows in wildest eddies and tangles,
Lion-like, March cometh in, hoarse, with tempestuous breath,
Through all the moaning chimneys, and thwart all the hollows
and angles

Round the shuddering house, threating of winter and death.

But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the meadow Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow, Deep in the oak's chill core, under the gathering drift.

Nay, to earth's life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire (How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes,Rapture of life ineffable, perfect,—as if in the brier,

Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense of the rose.