O, BIRDS, that sing such thankful psalms
Rebuking human fretting,
Teach us your secret of content,

Your science of forgetting;
For every life must have its ills,

You too have hours of sorrow;
Teach us, like you, to lay them by,
And sing again to-morrow;
For gems of darkest jet may lie
Within a golden setting,
And he is wise who understands
The science of forgetting.

O, palms, that bow before the gale
Until its peaceful ending,

Teach us your yielding linked with strength,

Your graceful art of bending;
For every tree must meet the gale,
Each heart encounter sorrow; •
Teach us, like you, to bow, that we
May stand erect to-morrow.

For there is strength in humble grace,
Ita wise disciples shielding;
And he is wise who understands
The happy art of yielding.

O, brooks, which laugh all night, all day,
With voice of sweet seduction,

Teach us your art of laughing still
At every new obstruction;

For every life has eddies deep

And rapids fiercely dashing,

Sometimes through gloomy caverns forced,
Sometimes in sunlight flashing;
Yet there is wisdom in your way,
Your laughing waves and wimples
Teach us your gospel of content,
The secret of your dimples.

O, trees, that stand in forest ranks,
Tall, strong, erect and sightly,
Your branches arched in noble grace,
Your leaflets laughing lightly,

Teach us your firm and quiet strength,
Your secret of extraction
From slimy darkness in the soil

The grace of life and action;
For they are rich who understand
The secret of combining
The good that's hidden deep in earth
With that where suns are shining.

O, myriad forms of earth and air,
Of lake, and sea, and river,

Which make our landscapes glad and fair
To glorify The Giver,

Teach us to learn the lessons hid

In each familiar feature,
The mystery which still perfects
Each low or lofty creature;
For God is good, and life is sweet,
And suns are brightly shining
To glad the gloom and thus rebuke
The folly of repining.

Each night is followed by the day,
Each storm by fairer weather,
While all the works of nature sing
Their psalms of joy together.
Then learn, O, heart, the song of hope;
Cease, soul, thy thankless sorrow;
For though the clouds be dark to-day
The sun shall shine to-morrow.
Learn well from bird, and tree, and rill,
The sin of dark resentment,

And know the greatest gift of God
Is faith and sweet contentment.

VEILED HARMONIES.

SWEETER the songs forever unsung

Than the psalms which found their voices; Back of the thought which found a pen A happier thought rejoices; And the grandest wonders hide and sleep In the space profound of the voiceless deep. Nobler the landscapes unrevealed

Than those that have charmed our seeing; Greater the things as yet unborn

Than those that have found a being;
And the brightest glories bathed in light
Are the ghosts of grander veiled from sight.

Sweet are the echoes soft and clear,
But the soul of sound is sweeter;

Glad are the joys which break in smiles,
But the sealed ones are completer;
And back of the loves our idols win
Are the deep heart secrets sealed within.

dren. Her first verses were written at the age of eight, and she had poems published when only fifteen. She was precocious in mathematics and showed in her early life an aptitude for logical and philosophical reasoning. The better part of her education was acquired at a public school, but she was also a student at Canaan Union Academy and Kimball Union Academy. She began teaching at fifteen and was thus employed summer and winter for seven years.

At twenty-two years of age Miss Cooper married G. H. Kimball, a printer, from whom she was divorced five years later. In 1866 she married Louis Bristol, a lawyer of New Haven, Conn., and removed to southern Illinois. In 1869 she published a volume of poems, and in this year gave her first public lecture, which latter circumstance seems to have changed the course of her intellectual career.

In 1872 she moved to Vineland, N. J., her present residence, from which date she has been called more and more before the public as a platform speaker. For four years she was president of the Ladies' Social Science Class in Vineland, N. J., giving lessons from Spencer and Carey every month. In the winter of 1880 she gave a course of lectures before the New York Positivist Society on "The Evolution of Character," followed by another course under the auspices of the Woman's Social Science Club of that city. In the following June she was sent by parties in New York to study the Equitable Association of Labor and Capital at the Familistère, at Guise, in France, founded by M. Godin. She was also commissioned to represent the New York Positivist Societry at an international convention of liberal thinkers at Brussels in September. Remaining at the Familistère for three months, and giving a lecture on the "Scientific Basis of Morality” before the Brussels convention, she returned home and published the "Rules and Statutes" of the association at Guise. In 1881 she was chosen state lecturer of the Patrons of Husbandry in New Jersey, and in the autumn of the following year was employed on a national lecture bureau of that order.

Since her husband's decease, which occurred in December, 1882, Mrs. Bristol has appeared but seldom on the public platform. For the last two years she has been the national superintendent of the Labor and Capital Department in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

As a poet Mrs. Bristol weaves her earnest thoughts and tender fancies together with a natural and easy grace. Her ideas are clothed in pure and womanly, as well as tuneful, words.

But Mrs. Bristol is better known as a speaker than as a writer. While she constructs fewer verses than formerly, she is, however, none the less a poet. She is a woman of medium height, and though not a blonde, she is of the type of woman called fair, with silken golden-brown hair and blue eyes. She has a fascinating personality, is not a mere rhapsodist, but is simply and naturally eloquent rather than rhetorical L. V. B.

THE "PIXIE."

SWEET child of April, I have found thy place
Of deep retirement; where the low swamp ferns
Curl upward from their sheaths, and lichens creep
Upon the fallen bough, and mosses dank
Deepen and brighten; where the ardent sun
Doth enter with restrained and chastened beam,
And the light cadence of the blue-bird's song
Doth falter in the cedar. There the spring
In quietude hath wrought the sweet surprise
And marvel of thy unobtrusive bloom.

Most perfect symbol of my dearest thought;
A thought so close and warm within my heart
No words can shape its secret, and no prayer
Can breathe its sacredness. Be thou my type,
And breathe to one who wanders here at dawn
The deep dvotion which, transcending speech,
Lights all the folded silence of my heart
As thy sweet beauty doth the shadow here.
So let thy clusters brighten, star on star
Of pink and white, about his ling'ring feet,
Till, dreaming and enchanted, there shall pass
Into his life the story that my soul

Hath given thee. So shall his will be stirred
To purest purpose and divinest deed,

And every hour be touched with grace and light.

HEART AZALEAS.

SOFTLY I slept in the green of my garden,
Sweetly I dreamed of the coming dawn;
Innocence waited as watcher and warden,
Keeping the curtain of mystery drawn.
But miracles came with the pulse of the morning
Into my being; I woke with a start;

The young tree of Love without budding or warning

Had suddenly sprung into bloom in the heart. Love's own azalea! Crimson azalea!

Wonderful bloom in the green of the heart!

177

Such an aurora of halo resplendent
Seemed to the world and the universe given!
Earth was enwrapt in a glory transcendent
Close in the tender embraces of Heaven.
Oh, I was brave in an ecstatic passion!
Ruler of Fate and creator of Art!
For Love is the empress of law and of fashion
When her red blossom unfolds in the heart.
Love's own azalea! Crimson azalea!
Wonderful bloom in the green of the heart!

Yet while I exulted and laughed in the morning, The beautiful blossom was touched with decay; Its death, like its advent, had come without warning

And stolen the charm of existence away. Oh, there was loneliness, darkness and sorrow! Faith lifted quickly her wing to depart! Hope had no promise or lease of to-morrow When the red bloom had dropped out of my

heart.

Love's own azalea! Crimson azalea! Blossoms but once in the green of the heart.

Then to the desolate places of spirit,
Toilers and helpers came in at my need;
Over the furrows of scorn and demerit
Angels were stooping to scatter the seed.
Oh, it was joy, after waiting and praying,

To feel the faint pulse of the buried seed start! And it was bliss worth the pain and delaying When a white bud opened out in my heart. Love's white azalea! Perfect azalea!

Slowly it grows into bloom in my heart.

Meanings that lurked in subtle concealment
Now to my purified vision are given;
Life is an earnest and sacred revealment;
Earth is the twilight that brightens to heaven;
Duty is Beauty in saintlier whiteness;

Truth is sublimer than Genius or Art;

And the specter of sorrow is crowned with a

brightness

As pure as the blossom that grows in my heart. Love's white azalea! Perfect azalea!

Slowly it grows into bloom in my heart.

Such an eternity opens before me:

Vision o'ermatching the pain and the cost! While Hope ever whispers that heaven will restore

me

The essence and soul of the blossom I lost. Time can not lessen and doubt can not smother The hope that my blossoms will each form a

part

Of the heaven that is coming, the one and the other,

To open for aye in the angelic heart. Crimson azalea! Snowy azalea!

Love has no loss in the angelic heart.

THE BIRD-SONG.

UPON the southern porch I sit

And smile to see the summer come;
I can not count the wings that flit
Or bees that hum.

I watch the July blossom turn
Its sweet heart-center to the light,
The sun-wrought secret in its urn
Revealed to sight.

I hear the drip of woodland springs,
Where the wild roses lean across
To mingle fragrant whisperings
Above the moss.

I feel the fingers of the breeze
Caressingly my hair entwine,

And think that touches such as these
Are half divine.

But most I marvel at a bird,

That trills a wild and wondrous note; The sweetest sound that ever stirred A warbler's throat.

He perches not in leafy nooks,

But seeks a tree-top, gaunt and bare, That all the woodland overlooks,

And warbles there.

Incarnate melody! Serene

He bides upon the summit high,
Where not a leaf can intervene
"Twixt song and sky.
Perchance some angel, loving me,

Hides in the plumage of the bird
And wins me with the sweetest plea
That e'e was heard,

And bids my human heart forego

Earth's easy coverts, cool and green, The long-drawn aisles of pomp and show, Wealth's flower screen,

And the poor words of worldly praise,
So cheaply bought, yet held so dear,
That I one song for Truth may raise
Divinely clear,

With not a laurel leaf between

The sunlight and my lifted eye, Or earthly shade to intervene 'Twixt soul and sky.

EMMA HUNTINGTON NASON.

RS. NASON is a native of Hallowell, Maine.

Mshe is of stanch Puritan descent, her father,

Samuel Huntington (a name not without distinguished representatives in other generations), being directly descended from Simon and Margaret Huntington, who emigrated from Norwich, England, to Massachusetts in 1639; while the family of the mother, Sally Mayo, was founded in this country in the same year by the Rev. John Mayo, one of the original settlers of Barnstable, Cape Cod, and first pastor of the second church, Boston.

Mrs. Nason attended the Hallowell Academy for a time, and afterwards was gradutated from Kent's Hill, Maine. When only twelve years old she began to write in verse, and her poems were published in the Portland Transcript. For several years she wrote under the name of John G. Andrews, but was finally persuaded to appear under her own name. Since then she has been a frequent contributor to The Independent, The Churchman, The Commonwealth, etc., although she has been especially interested in writing for young people.

Before the publication of her volume, “White Sails," she was chosen one of ten poets whose ballads, beautifully illustrated, appear in a volume entitled, "Children's Ballads from History and Folk Lore."

Mrs. Nason is an enthusiastic student of German literature, being very fond of that language. Moreover she wields a brush with almost as much grace as she does the pen. She has a face in which do meet "sweet records, and promises as sweet.” In her dark eyes one sees "thought folded over thought." Hers is a face which must be very grave, indeed, in her hours of meditation when writing such a poem as "Simon the Cyrene." Yet she is an optimist, happily; a woman, too, whose lightest word and movement are stamped by refinement. K. V.

THE BISHOP'S VISIT.

TELL you about it? Of course I will!

I thought 't would be dreadful to have him come,
For mamma said I must be quiet and still;
And she put away my whistle and drum,

And made me unharness the parlor chairs,
And packed my cannon and all the rest
Of my noisiest play things off up-stairs,
On account of this very distinguished guest.
Then every room was turned upside down,
And all the carpets hung out to blow;
For when the Bishop is coming to town

The house must be in order, you know.