grazes,

And every breeze from thy fair rivers blown,

And all the nestlings from thy branches flown,

Are eloquent in thy praises,

Demeter, mother of truth.

Thy seasons of grief, thy winters white with snowing,

More lovely make thy face, adorn thy head,

Add beauty to thy sweet eyes, ever glowing

With love and strength and godhead; and thy tread

Sweetens the earth; and all the gods are dead

But thee, thee only, strowing
Ever the land with youth.

And all the dead gods are in thee united, Woman and girl and lover and friend and queen;

And this tame, time-worn world is full requited

For that the Christ has cost us, and the teen

Bred of swift time. palms between

Thy dear kissed hands

And thy kissed

are righted The heart-knot and the ruth.

WHAT

THOUGH THE GREEN LEAF GROW?

WHAT though the green leaf grow?
'T will last a month and day;
In all sweet flowers that blow
Lurks Death, his slave Decay.

SONG, YOUTH, AND SORROW

LOFTY against our Western dawn uprises Achilles:

He among heroes alone singeth or toucheth the lyre.

Few, and dimmed by grief, are the days that to him are appointed!

Love he shall know but to lose, life but to cast it away.

Dreaming of peace and a bride, he sees not the foes at the portal:

Paris, a traitor to love; Phoebus, accorder of song!

Freely he chose, do ye deem, and clave to the anguish and glory?

Rather the Fates at his birth chose, yet he gladly assents.

Is it a warning that death untimely and

bitterest sorrow,

Sorrow in love, and death, follow the children of song?

Yet will the young man's heart still cling to the choice of Achilles

Grief, an untimely doom, fame that eternal abides.

MY FATHERLAND

THE imperial boy had fallen in his pride
Before the gates of golden Babylon.
The host, who deemed that priceless
treasure won,

For many a day since then had wandered wide,

By famine thinned, by savage hordes defied. In a deep vale, beneath the setting

sun,

They saw at last a swift black river run, While shouting spearmen thronged the farther side.

Then eagerly, with startled, joyous eyes, Toward the desponding chief a soldier flew:

"I was a slave in Athens, never knew My native country; but I understand The meaning of yon wild barbarian cries, And I believe this is my fatherland!"

This glimpse have we, no more. Did parents fond,

Brothers, or kinsmen, hail his late return?

Or did he, doubly exiled, only yearn To greet the Euxine's waves at Trebizond, The blue Egean, and Pallas' towers beyond?

Mute is the record. We shall never learn.

But as once more the well-worn page I turn, Forever by reluctant schoolboys conned,

A parable to me the tale appears,

Of blacker waters in a drearier vale.

Ah me! When on that brink we exiles stand,

As earthly lights and mortal accents fail, Shall voices long forgotten reach our ears, To tell us we have found our fatherland?