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Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote

The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.

SHAKESPEARE.

VISION as of crowded city streets, With human life in endless overflow;

Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets

that blow

To battle; clamor, in obscure retreats, Of sailors landed from their anchored

fleets;

Tolling of bells in turrets, and below Voices of children, and bright flowers

that throw

O'er garden-walls their intermingled sweets!

This vision comes to me when I unfold

The volume of the Poet paramount,

Whom all the Muses loved, not one

alone;

Into his hands they put the lyre of gold, And, crowned with sacred laurel at their fount,

Placed him as Musagetes on their throne.

MILTON.

PACE the sounding sea-beach

and behold

How the voluminous billows roll

and run,

Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled,

And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold

All its loose-flowing garments into one, Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun

Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold.

So in majestic cadence rise and fall

The mighty undulations of thy song,
O sightless bard, England's Mæonides!

And ever and anon, high over all
Uplifted, a ninth wave, superb and

strong,

Floods all the soul with its melodious

seas.

KEATS.

HE young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;

The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!

The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold

To the red rising moon, and loud and

deep

The nightingale is singing from the steep; It is midsummer, but the air is cold; Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.

Lo in the moonlight gleams a marble

[blocks in formation]

Of his sweet singing? Rather let me

write :

"The smoking flax before it burst to flame

Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."

THE TIDES.

SAW the long line of the vacant shore,

The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand,

And the brown rocks left bare on every hand,

As if the ebbing tide would flow no

more.

Then heard I, more distinctly than before, The ocean breathe and its great breast

expand,

And hurrying came on the defenceless land

The insurgent waters with tumultuous

roar.

All thought and feeling and desire, I said,

Love, laughter, and the exultant joy of

song

Have ebbed from me forever! Sud

denly o'er me

They swept again from their deep ocean bed,

And in a tumult of delight, and strong As youth, and beautiful as youth, upbore me.

66

A NAMELESS GRAVE.

SOLDIER of the Union mustered out,"

Is the inscription on an unknown grave

At Newport News, beside the salt-sea

wave,

Nameless and dateless; sentinel or

scout

Shot down in skirmish, or disastrous rout Of battle, when the loud artillery drave Its iron wedges through the ranks of

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