I hear thy voice in the lark's clear note,

In the cricket's chirp at the evening hour, In the zephyr's sighs that around me float, In the breathing bud and the opening flower.

I see thy forms o'er the parting earth,

In the tender shoots of the grassy blade, In the thousand plants that spring to birth, On the valley's side in the home of shade.

I feel thy promise in all my veins,

They bound with a feeling long suppressed, And, like a captive who breaks his chains, Leap the glad hopes in my heaving breast.

There are life and joy in thy coming spring!
Thou hast no tidings of gloom and death :
But buds thou shakest from every wing,
And sweets thou breathest with every breath.

benry Wadsworth Longfellow.
1807-1882.

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.

Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore

Saint Filomena bore.

MEMORIES.

Oft I remember those whom I have known
In other days, to whom my heart was led
As by a magnet, and who are not dead,
But absent, and their memories overgrown
With other thoughts and troubles of my own,
As graves with grasses are, and at their head
The stone with moss and lichens so o'erspread,
Nothing is legible but the name alone.

And is it so with them? After long years,
Do they remember me in the same way,
And is the memory pleasant as to me?

I fear to ask; yet wherefore are my fears?
Pleasures, like flowers, may wither and decay,
And yet the root perennial may be.

FROM "THE NEW ENGLAND TRAGEDIES."

And as the flowing of the ocean fills

Each creek and branch thereof, and then retires,
Leaving behind a sweet and wholesome savor;
So doth the virtue and the life of God
Flow evermore into the hearts of those
Whom He hath made partakers of His nature;
And, when it but withdraws itself a little,
Leaves a sweet savor after it, that many
Can say they are made clean by every word
That He hath spoken to them in their silence.

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Let us, then, labor for an inward stillness,
An inward stillness and an inward healing;
That perfect silence where the lips and heart
Are still, and we no longer entertain
Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions,
But God alone speaks in us, and we wait
In singleness of heart, that we may know
His will, and in the silence of our spirits,
That we may do His will, and do that only!

FROM "THE GOLDEN LEGEND."

Slowly, slowly up the wall

Steals the sunshine, steals the shade; Evening damps begin to fall,

Evening shadows are displayed. Round me, o'er me, everywhere, All the sky is grand with clouds, And athwart the evening air

Wheel the swallows home in crowds. Shafts of sunshine from the west

Paint the dusky windows red; Darker shadows, deeper rest, Underneath and overhead. Darker, darker, and more wan, In my breast the shadows fall; Upward steals the life of man, As the sunshine from the wall. From the wall into the sky,

From the roof along the spire; Ah, the souls of those that die Are but sunbeams lifted higher.

Time has laid his hand

Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm

Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.