DAYLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT.

IN broad daylight, and at noon,
Yesterday I saw the moon
Sailing high, but faint and white,
As a school-boy's paper kite.

In broad daylight, yesterday,
I read a Poet's mystic lay;
And it seemed to me at most
As a phantom, or a ghost.

But at length the feverish day
Like a passion died away,
And the night, serene and still,
Fell on village, vale, and hill.

Then the moon, in all her pride,
Like a spirit glorified,

Filled and overflowed the night
With revelations of her light.

And the Poet's song again
Passed like music through my brain;
Night interpreted to me

All its grace and mystery.

THE JEWISH CEMETERY AT NEWPORT.

"July 9, 1852. [Newport, R. I.] Went this morning into the Jewish burying-ground, with a polite old gentleman who keeps the key. There are few graves; nearly all are low tombstones of

marble, with Hebrew inscriptions, and a few words added in E lish or Portuguese. At the foot of each, the letters S. A. G. D. [Su Alma Goce Divina Gloria. May his soul enjoy divine glor It is a shady nook, at the corner of two dusty, frequented stree with an iron fence and a granite gateway, erected at the exper of Mr. Touro, of New Orleans."

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in the

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 these 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.

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,

"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."

Line 7. While underneath such leafy tents they keep

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 desolate These 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.

Anathema maranatha !

was the cry

That rang from town to town, from street to street;

At every gate the accursed Mordecai

Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Chris

tian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand

Walked with them through the world where

they went;

Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus forever with reverted look

The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.

OLIVER BASSELIN.

IN the Valley of the Vire

Still is seen an ancient mill,
With its gables quaint and queer,
And beneath the window-sill,
On the stone,

These words alone:

"Oliver Basselin lived here."

Far above it, on the steep,

Ruined stands the old Château ;

Nothing but the donjon keep

Left for shelter or for show.
Its vacant eyes

Stare at the skies,

Stare at the valley green and deep.

Once a convent, old and brown,
Looked, but ah! it looks no more,
From the neighboring hillside down
On the rushing and the roar
Of the stream

Whose sunny gleam

Cheers the little Norman town.

In that darksome mill of stone,
To the water's dash and din,
Careless, humble, and unknown,
Sang the poet Basselin
Songs that fill

That ancient mill

With a splendor of its own.

Never feeling of unrest

Broke the pleasant dream he dreamed;

Only made to be his nest,

All the lovely valley seemed,

No desire

Of soaring higher

Stirred or fluttered in his breast.

True, his songs were not divine;

Were not songs of that high art,

Which, as winds do in the pine,