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Very good in its way

Is the Verzenay,

Or the Sillery soft and creamy;

But Catawba wine

Has a taste more divine,

More dulcet, delicious, and dreamy.

There grows no vine

By the haunted Rhine,

By Danube or Guadalquivir,

Nor on island or cape,

That bears such a grape

As grows by the Beautiful River.

Drugged is their juice

For foreign use,

When shipped o'er the reeling Atlantic,

To rack our brains

With the fever pains,

That have driven the Old World frantic.

To the sewers and sinks

With all such drinks,

And after them tumble the mixer;

For a poison malign

Is such Borgia wine,

Or at best but a Devil's Elixir.

While pure as a spring

Is the wine I sing,

And to praise it, one needs but name it;

For Catawba wine

Has need of no sign,

No tavern-bush to proclaim it.

And this Song of the Vine,

This greeting of mine,

The winds and the birds shall deliver

To the Queen of the West,

In her garlands dressed,

On the banks of the Beautiful River.

SANTA FILOMENA.

WHENE'ER a noble deed is wrought, Whene'er is spoken a noble thought, Our hearts, in glad surprise,

To higher levels rise.

The tidal wave of deeper souls

Into our inmost being rolls,

And lifts us unawares

Out of all meaner cares.

Honor to those whose words or deeds

Thus help us in our daily needs,

• And by their overflow

Raise us from what is low!

Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,

The trenches cold and damp,

The starved and frozen camp, —

The wounded from the battle-plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,

The cheerless corridors,

The cold and stony floors.

Lo! in that house of misery

A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering gloom,

And flit from room to room.

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,

The speechless sufferer turns to kiss

Her shadow, as it falls

Upon the darkening walls.

As if a door in heaven should be
Opened and then closed suddenly,

The vision came and went,

The light shone and was spent.

On England's annals, through the long Hereafter of her speech and song,

That light its rays shall cast

From portals of the past.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand

In the great history of the land,

A noble type of good,

Heroic womanhood.

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