ABOVE AND BELOW.

I.

O DWELLERS in the valley-land, Who in deep twilight grope and

cower,

Till the slow mountain's dial-hand Shortens to noon's triumphal hour,

While ye sit idle, do ye think

The Lord's great work sits idle too?

That light dare not o'erleap the brink

Of morn, because 'tis dark with you?

Though yet your valleys skulk in night,

In God's ripe fields the day is cried,

And reapers, with their sickles bright,

Troop, singing, down the mountain-side:

Come up and feel what health there is

In the frank Dawn's delighted eyes,

As bending with a pitying kiss,

The night-shed tears of earth she dries!

IT was past the hour of trysting, But she lingered for him still; Like a child, the eager streamlet Leaped and laughed adown the hill,

Happy to be free at twilight

From its toiling at the mill.

Then the great moon on a sudden
Ominous, and red as blood,
Startling as a new creation,

O'er the eastern hill-top stood, Casting deep and deeper shadows Through the mystery of the wood.

Dread closed huge and vague about her,

And her thoughts turned fear-. fully

To her heart, if there some shelter From the silence there might be, Like bare cedars leaning inland From the blighting of the sea.

Yet he came not, and the stillness Dampened round her like a tomb; She could feel cold eyes of spirits

Looking on her through the gloom, She could hear the groping footsteps

Of some blind, gigantic doom. Suddenly the silence wavered

Like a light mist in the wind, For a voice broke gently through it, Felt like sunshine by the blind, And the dread, like mistin sunshine, Furled serenely from her mind.

"Once my love, my love for ever,
Flesh or spirit still the same,
If I missed the hour of trysting,
Do not think my faith to blame;
I, alas! was made a captive,

As from Holy Land I came.

"On a green spot in the desert, Gleaming like an emerald star, Where a palm-tree, in lone silence, Yearning for its mate afar, Droops above a silver runnel, Slender as a scimitar,

"There thou'lt find the humble postern

To the castle of my foe; If thy love burn clear and faithful, Strike the gateway, green and low, Ask to enter, and the warder

Surely will not say thee no." Slept again the aspen silence, But her loneliness was o'er; Round her heart a

patience

motherly

Wrapt its arms for evermore; From her soul ebbed back the

And thereat she knocketh gently, Fearing much the warder's No; All her heart stood still and listened,

As the doorswung backward slow.

There she saw no surly warder

With an eye like bolt and bar; Through her soul a sense of music Throbbed, and, like a guardian Lar,

On the threshold stood an angel,
Bright and silent as a star.

While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine,

Holds up its leaves in happy, happy silence,

Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended,

I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands,

And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence.

Upon the brink of some woodnestled lakelet,

Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad,

And her spirit, lily-wise, Blossomed when he turned upon

stem, whose shadow

Slopes quivering down the water's dusky quiet,

Thou shrink'st as on her bath's edge would some startled Dyrad.

Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers;

Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping;

Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience,

And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping.

Thou art to me like my beloved maiden,

So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences;

Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leaflets Sprinkle their gathered sunshine o'er my senses,

And Nature gives me all her summer confidences.

Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble,

Thou sympathisest still; wild and unquiet,

I fling me down; thy ripple, like a river,

Flows valleyward, where calmness is, and by it

dumb, dumb for ever!

land of quiet.

AN INTERVIEW WITH

MILES STANDISH.

I SAT one evening in my room,

In that sweet hour of twilight When blended thoughts, half light, half gloom,

Throng through the spirit's skylight;

The flames by fits curled round the bars,

Or up the chimney crinkled, While embers dropped like falling stars,

And in the ashes tinkled.

I sat and mused; the fire burned low,

And, o'er my senses stealing, Crept something of the ruddy glow That bloomed on wall and ceiling;

My pictures (they are very few,

The heads of ancient wise men) Smoothed down their knotted fronts, and grew As rosy as excisemen.

My antique high-backed Spanish chair

Felt thrills through wood and leather,

That had been strangers since whilere,

'Mid Andalusian heather, The oak that made its sturdy frame His happy arms stretched over The ox whose fortunate hide be

came

The bottom's polished cover.

It came out in that famous bark, That brought our sires intrepid, Capacious as another ark

For furniture decrepit; For, as that saved of bird and beast A pair for propagation, So has the seed of these increased And furnished half the nation.

Kings sit, they say, in slippery

seats;

But those slant precipices Of ice the northern voyager meets Less slippery are than this is;