RELIEVING GUARD. T. S. K. OBIIT MARCH 4, 1864. CAME the Relief. "What, Sentry, ho! How passed the night through thy long waking?" "Cold, cheerless, dark,-as may befit The hour before the dawn is breaking." "No sight? no sound ?" "No; nothing save The plover from the marshes calling, And in yon Western sky, about An hour ago, a Star was falling." "A star? There's nothing strange in that." "No, nothing; but, above the thicket, Somehow it seemed to me that God Somewhere had just relieved a picket." A GEOLOGICAL MADRIGAL. AFTER HERRICK. I HAVE found out a gift for my fair; Where the footprints of Aves declare The birds that once walked on the ground; O, come, and--in technical speech We'll walk this Devonian shore, Or on some Silurian beach We'll wander, my love, evermore. I will show thee the sinuous track By the slow-moving annelid made, Or the Trilobite that, farther back, In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid. Thou shalt see, in his Jurassic tomb, The Plesiosaurus embalmed; In his Oolitic prime and his bloom, Iguanodon safe and unharmed! You wished-I remember it well, And I loved you the more for that wish For a perfect cystedian shell And a whole holocephalic fish. And O, if Earth's strata contains In its lowest Silurian drift, Or Palæozoic remains The same, 'tis your lover's free gift! Then come, love, and never say nay, But calm all your maidenly fears, And though the Darwinian plan We'll find the beginning of man, Our fossil ancestors in rock! |