No pleasure-trip was that, through flood and flame!
We raced with death,-we hunted noble game.
All night we dragged the woods without avail; ·
The leaves got drenched- -we could not keep the trail.
Three times again my cabin home I found,

Half hoping she might be there safe and sound;
But each time 'twas an unavailing care,

My house had lost its soul; she was not there!
When, climbing the wet trees, next morning-sun
Laughed at the ruin that the night had done,
Bleeding and drenched-by toil and sorrow bent—
Back to what used to be my home I went.
But as I neared our little clearing-ground-
Listen!--I heard the cow-bell's tinkling sound;
The cabin door was just a bit ajar;

It gleamed upon my glad eyes like a star!

"Brave heart," I said, "for such a fragile form!

She made them guide her homeward through the storm! Such pangs of joy I never felt before: "You've come!" I shouted, and rushed through the door.

Yes, she had come and gone again. She lay

With all her young life crushed and wrenched away—
Lay-the heart-ruins of our home among-

Not far from where I killed her with my tongue.
The rain-drops glittered 'mid her hair's long strands,
The forest-thorns had torn her feet and hands,

But 'midst the tears-brave tears-that I could trace
Upon the pale but sweetly resolute face,

I once again the mournful words could read-
"I've tried to do my best-I have indeed."
And now I'm mostly done: my story's o'er-
Part of it never breathed the air before.
"Tisn't over-usual, it must be allowed,
To volunteer heart-history to a crowd,
And scatter 'mongst them confidential tears,
But you'll protect an old man with his years;
And wheresoe'er this story's voice can reach
This is the sermon I would have it preach:

Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds; You can't do that way when you're flying words. "Careful with fire," is good advice we know: "Careful with words," is ten times doubly so. Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead; But God Himself can't kill them when they're said! You have my life-grief: do not think a minute 'Twas told to take up time. There's business in it. It sheds advice; whoe'er will take and live it, Is welcome to the pain it costs to give it.

EDGAR FAWCETT.

Born in New York City, 26th May 1847. Author of Fantasy and Passion (Boston, 1878); Song and Story (1884); Romance and Revery (1886). Mr Fawcett is also the author of numerous novels, besides one or two books of essays. The poems from Fantasy and Passion are given with the kind permission of Roberts Brothers, and the others with the kind permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.]

IMPERFECTION.

WHENCE Comes the old silent charm whose tender stress Has many a mother potently beguiled

To leave her rosier children, and caress

The white brow of the frail misshapen child? Ah! whence the mightier charm that age by age Has lured so many a man, through spells unknown,

To serve for years, in reverent vassalage,

A beauteous bosom and a heart of stone.

THE PUNISHMENT.

Two haggard shades, in robes of mist,
For longer years than each could tell,
Joined by a stern gyve, wrist with wrist,
Have roamed the courts of hell.

Their blank eyes know each other not;
Their cold hearts hate this union drear

Yet one poor ghost was Launcelot,
And one was Guinevere.

THE MEETING.

I SAW in dreams a dim bleak heath,
Where towered a gaunt pine by a rock,
And suddenly, from the earth beneath,
That rent itself with an angry shock,
A shape sprang forth to that wild place,
Whose limbs by chains were trenched and marred
And whose sardonic pain-worn face

Was grimly scorched and scarred.

He waited by the spectral pine;
Aloft he lifted haggard eyes;
A woman's form, of mien divine,

Dropt earthward in seraphic wise.
Chaste as though bathed in breaking day
And radiant with all saintly charms,

She flew toward him till she lay

Close-locked in his dark arms!

I heard a far vague voice that said:

"On earth these twain had loved so well
That now their lives, when both are dead,
Burst the great bounds of Heaven and Hell.
Alike o'er powers of gloom and light

Prevailed their fervid prayers and tears;
They meet on this bleak heath one night
In every thousand years!"

TO AN ORIOLE.

How falls it, oriole, thou hast come to fly
In tropic splendour through our Northern sky?
At some glad moment was it nature's choice
To dower a scrap of sunset with a voice?

Or did some orange tulip, flaked with black,
In some forgotten garden, ages back,

Yearning toward heaven until its wish was heard
Desire unspeakably to be a bird?

THE MOON IN THE CITY.

PALE roamer through the purple hollow of night,
In all thy wanderings weird, from East to West,
What wonder thou dost gladly shower thy light
On many a dusky region of earth's breast?
Wild tracts of cloisteral forest-land I know

Are welcome to that luminous heart of thine,
Where under murmurous branches thou canst throw
Dim palpitant arabesques of shade and shine!
Smooth meadows dying against far opal skies
Thou lovest with lonely splendours to illume,
And turn their bodiless vapours, when they rise,
To phantoms greatening in the doubtful gloom.
The haughtiest mountain happy dost thou feel
To mantle with thy radiance, chastely soft,
Like intercessional mercy's meek appeal

Where cold majestic justice towers aloft !
When deep in measureless peace he lulls his waves,
Or when their perilous masses proudly curl,
Thy pennon of brilliance, though he smiles or raves,
Along the varying sea dost thou unfurl!

But ah! though forest, mountain, meadow and sea,
Shall each thy separate favour sweetly win,
White lily of heaven, how can it pleasure thee
To blossom above the city's ghastly sin!

DECORATION DAY.

TO-DAY, as the pulses powerful

Of the glad young year awake,
It would seem that with tokens flowerful
A nation had gone to take,

While passing in throngs processional
Over sweeps of mellowed sod,
The sky for a blue confessional,
And to tell its grief to God!

But more than to march regretfully
With the earthward-pointing gun,
And more than to merge forgetfully
The Blue and the Gray in one,
Were to love, with its sweet sublimity,
The thought of an endless peace,
And to swear, in grand unanimity,
That war shall forever cease!

For how is your service beautiful,
O mourners that meet to-day,
If the hands that are now so dutiful
Shall to-morrow spoil and slay?
If the hate that your love is levelling
Shall to-morrow lift its brow,
And redden with bloody revelling
The graves that you garland now?

For only if all humanity

Could have learned to well abhor

The imperious blind insanity,

The iniquitous waste of war,

Would the splendid and stainless purity
Of to-day beam out afar,

Down the duskiness of futurity,

As with light of a morning star!

And then would the blooms you shed upon
These numberless grave-mounds be
As though the dews they had fed upon
Were the waters of Galilee

FIAT JUSTITIA.

I.

THEY tell her he is dead; and when she hears Right instantly she fears

Lest they shall wonder that she sheds no tears