Hearing his imperial name

Coupled with those words of malice,
Half in anger, half in shame,
Forth the great campaigner came
Slowly from his canvas palace.

"Let no hand the bird molest,"

Said he solemnly, "nor hurt her!" Adding then, by way of jest, "Golondrina is my guest,

'Tis the wife of some deserter !"

Swift as bowstring speeds a shaft,

Through the camp was spread the rumor, And the soldiers, as they quaffed Flemish beer at dinner, laughed

At the Emperor's pleasant humor.

So unharmed and unafraid

Sat the swallow still and brooded,
Till the constant cannonade

Through the walls a breach had made,
And the siege was thus concluded.

Then the army, elsewhere bent,
Struck its tents as if disbanding,

Only not the Emperor's tent,

For he ordered, ere he went,

Very curtly, "Leave it standing!"

So it stood there all alone,

Loosely flapping, torn and tattered, Till the brood was fledged and flown, Singing o'er those walls of stone

Which the cannon-shot had shattered.

LEAFLESS are the trees; their purple branches Spread themselves abroad, like reefs of coral, Rising silent

In the Red Sea of the Winter sunset.

From the hundred chimneys of the village,

Like the Afreet in the Arabian story,

Smoky columns

Tower aloft into the air of amber.

YY

At the window winks the flickering fire-light:
Here and there the lamps of evening glimmer,
Social watch-fires

Answering one another through the darkness.

On the hearth the lighted logs are glowing,
And like Ariel in the cloven pine-tree
For its freedom

Groans and sighs the air imprisoned in them.

By the fireside there are old men seated,
Seeing ruined cities in the ashes,

Asking sadly

Of the Past what it can ne'er restore them.

By the fireside there are youthful dreamers,
Building castles fair, with stately stairways.
Asking blindly

Of the Future what it cannot give them.

By the fireside tragedies are acted
In whose scenes appear two actors only,
Wife and husband,

And above them God the sole spectator.

By the fireside there are peace and comfort,
Wives and children, with fair, thoughtful faces,
Waiting, watching

For a well-known footstep in the passage.

Each man's chimney is his Golden Mile-stone;
Is the central point, from which he measures
Every distance

Through the gateways of the world around him.

In his farthest wanderings still he sees it;
Hears the talking flame, the answering night-wind,
As he heard them

When he sat with those who were, but are not.

THE GOLDEN MILE-STONE.

Happy he whom neither wealth nor fashion,
Nor the march of the encroaching city,
Drives an exile

From the hearth of his ancestral homestead.

We may build more splendid habitations,

Fill our rooms with paintings and with sculptures,
But we cannot

Buy with gold the old associations!

THE JEWISH CEMETERY AT NEWPORT.

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,

Silent beside the never-silent waves,

At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south wind's breath,

While underneath such leafy tents they keep

The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down

And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

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The very names recorded here are strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes Alvares and Rivera interchange

With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

;

"Blessed be God! for He created Death!" The mourners said, "and Death is rest and Then added, in the certainty of faith,

peace;

"And giveth Life that never more shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,

No Psalms of David now the silence break,

No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue

In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,

And not neglected; for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,

Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here?

What burst of Christian hate,

What persecution, merciless and blind, Drove o'er the sea-that desert desolateThese Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire ;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,

The wasting famine of the heart they fed,

And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.