I saw it creep and crawl and grow,
A forceless, formless thing.

Determined, tireless, ceaseless, slow,
Silent and silencing;

I saw it creep and crawl and rise
And crawl into the skies;

The stars began to faint and fail,
That were so pure and clear;

The moon took on a loathsome look
Of likeness to her fear-

That closer crawled and clung to her
And clung more near and near.

The smothered moon went out and left
Not even the mist to see,

Mere blankness, and a sickening sense
Of something worse to be;

And certainly in midst of it

An awful thing I wist,

It was to know that all the world

Was nothing but a mist

But a creeping, crawling mist

A RAINY DAY.

A WIND that shrieks to the window pane,
A wind in the chimney moaning,
A wind that tramples the ripened grain,
And sets the trees a-groaning;

A wind that is dizzy with whirling play,
A dozen winds that have lost their way
In spite of the other's calling.
A thump of apples on the ground,
A flutter and flurry and whirling round
Of leaves too soon a-dying;

A tossing and streaming like hair unbound
Of the willow boughs a-flying;

A lonely road and a gloomy lane,
An empty lake that is blistered with rain,
And a heavy sky that is falling.

EDWARD ROWLAND SILL.

[Born at Windsor, Connecticut, 29th April 1841. Died at Cleveland, Ohio, 27th February 1887. Graduated at Yale, 1861. Author of The Hermitage, and other Poems (1868, Leypoldt & Holt, New York); Poems (1888, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston). The poems given are quoted from the latter volume with the kind permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.]

OPPORTUNITY.

THIS I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream :-
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged

A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle's edge,

And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel-
That blue blade that the king's son bears,-but this
Blunt thing!-he snapt and flung it from his hand.

And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day.

FIVE LIVES.

FIVE mites of monads dwelt in a round drop
That twinkled on a leaf by a pool in the sun.
To the naked eye they lived invisible;
Specks, for a world of whom the empty shell
Of a mustard-seed had been a hollow sky.

One was a meditative monad, called a sage;
And, shrinking all his mind within, he thought:
Tradition, handed down for hours and hours,
Tells that our globe, this quivering crystal world,
Is slowly dying. What if, seconds hence
When I am very old, yon shimmering doom
Come drawing down and down, till all things end?"
Then with a wizen smirk he proudly felt
No other mote of God had ever gained
Such giant grasp of universal truth.

One was a transcendental monad; thin

And long and slim of the mind; and thus he mused: "Oh vast, unfathomable monad-souls!

Made in the image —a hoarse frog croaks from the pool,
"Hark! 'twas some god, voicing his glorious thought
In thunder music! Yea, we hear their voice,

And we may guess their minds from ours, their work.
Some taste they have like ours, some tendency
To wriggle about, and munch a trace of scum.”
He floated up on a pin-point bubble of gas
That burst, pricked by the air, and he was gone.

One was a barren-minded monad, called
A positivist; and he knew positively;
"There was no world beyond this certain drop.
Prove me another! Let the dreamers dream
Of their faint gleams, and noises from without,
And higher and lower; life is life enough."
Then swaggering half a hair's breadth hungrily
He seized upon an atom of bug, and fed.

One was a tattered monad, called a poet; And with shrill voice estatic thus he sang. "Oh, little female monad's lips!

Oh, little female monad's eyes!

Ah, the little, little, female, female monad!"

The last was a strong-minded monadess,
Who dashed amid the infusoria,

Danced high and low, and wildly spun and dove,
Till the dizzy others held their breath to see.

But while they led their wondrous little lives
Eonian moments had gone wheeling by,

The burning drop had shrunk with fearful speed;
A glistening film-'twas gone; the leaf was dry.
The little ghost of an inaudible squeak

Was lost to the frog that goggled from his stone;

Who, at the huge, slow tread of a thoughtful ox Coming to drink, stirred sideways fatly, plunged, Launched backward twice, and all the pool was still.

THE FOOL'S PRAYER.

THE Royal feast was done; the King
Sought some new sport to banish care,
And to his jester cried: "Sir Fool,

Kneel now, and make for us a prayer!"

The Jester doffed his cap and bells
And stood the mocking court before;
They could not see the bitter smile
Behind the painted grin he wore.

He bowed his head, and bent his knee
Upon the Monarch's silken stool;

His pleading voice, "O Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!

"No pity, Lord, could change the heart
From red with wrong to white as wool-
The rod must heal the sin; but, Lord,
Be merciful to me, a fool!

""Tis not by guilt the onward sweep
Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay;
'Tis by our follies that so long

We hold the earth from heaven away.

"These clumsy feet, still in the mire,
Go crushing blossoms without end;
These hard-well-meaning hands we thrust
Among a heart-strings of a friend.

"The ill-timed truth we might have keptWho knows how sharp it pierced and stung? The word we had not sense to say

Who knows how grandly it had rung?

"Our faults no tenderness should ask,

The chastening stripes must cleanse them all; But for our blunders-oh, in shame

Before the eyes of heaven we fall.

"Earth bears no balsams for mistakes;

Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool That did his will; but thou, O Lord, Be merciful to me, a fool!"

The room was hushed; in silence rose
The King, and sought his gardens cool,
And walked apart, and murmured low,
"Be merciful to me, a fool!"