'But she, like a thing of peasant race, That is happy binding the sheaves;' Then he saw her dead mother in her face, And said, 'Thou shalt have thy leaves.' II That you will give me the first, first thing You meet at your castle-gate, And the Princess shall get the Singing Leaves, Or mine be a traitor's fate.' The King's head dropt upon his breast A moment, as it might be; He mounted and rode three days 'T will be my dog, he thought, and And will bring to me the Singing And lighted her tears as the sud Leaves If they grow under the moon?' den sun Transfigures the summer rain. Then lightly turned him Walter And the first Leaf, when it was And the second Leaf sang: 'But That Thou revisit'st all who wait And said, 'I am thine, thine, Far and more far the wave's re 'Good counsel gave the bird,' said With momentary brede of pearl But swells my debt and deepens THERE lay upon the ocean's shore my self-blame. What once a tortoise served to cover; Shall I less patience have than A year and more, with rush and The surf had rolled it over, Had played with it, and flung it by, Twelve throbs that tolled the zenith of the dark, As wind and weather might decide | And it, mornward now the starry hands move on; Then tossed it high where sand-Mornward!' the angelic watchers drifts dry Cheap burial might provide it. It rested there to bleach or tan, The rains had soaked, the suns had burned it; With many a ban the fisherman say, 'Passed is the sorest trial; No plot of man can stay The hand upon the dial; Night is the dark stem of the lily Day.' Had stumbled o'er and spurned it; If we, who watched in valleys here And there the fisher-girl would below, Toward streaks, misdeemed of morn, our faces turned When volcan glares set all the east aglow, We are not poorer that we wept and yearned; Though earth swing wide from And though no man nor nation In shape, material, and dimen- Yet by one Sun is every orbit bent. sion! Give it but strings, and, lo, it sings, A wonderful invention!' FOR AN AUTOGRAPH So said, so done; the chords he THOUGH old the thought and oft And, as his fingers o'er them hov- 'T is his at last who says it best, ered, The shell disdained a soul had gained, The lyre had been discovered. O empty world that round us lies, Dead shell, of soul and thought forsaken, I'll try my fortune with the rest. Life is a leaf of paper white Whereon each one of us may write His word or two, and then comes night. Brought we but eyes like Mer- 'Lo, time and space enough,' we THIS is the midnight of the cen- Luck hates the slow and loves the bold, Through aisle and arch of God- Soon come the darkness and the tury, hark! minster have gone cold. Greatly begin! though thou have The withered leaves keep dumb What gospels lost the woods re- The deep canals of flowing grass. Like those who toil through drifted Whose rash disherison never falls snow! On us unthinking prodigals, Away, my poets, whose sweet Yet who convictest all our ill, spell Can make a garden of a cell! I need ye not, for I to-day 50 So grand and unappeasable! Methinks my heart from each of these Will make one long sweet verse of Plucks part of childhood back Doth every hidden odor seize run In some dark corner shall be leant. the limb! The cat-bird croons in the lilac bush! Through the dim arbor, himself more dim, Silently hops the hermit-thrush, 59 Upon these elm-arched solitudes No hum of neighbor toil intrudes; The only hammer that I hear Is wielded by the woodpecker, The single noisy calling his In all our leaf-hid Sybaris; here, Persists, a loyal cavalier, So, from the ruins of this day While Roundheads prim, with Carved with some fragment of the point of fox, box; 70 law, Probe wainscot-chink and empty Which, set in life's prosaic wall, Here no hoarse-voiced iconoclast, A willing convert of the trees. Oh, might we but of such rare days Their dwelling here for memory's sake. MASACCIO IN THE BRANCACCI CHAPEL HE came to Florence long ago, shone For Raphael and for Angelo, The shadows deepened, and I turned Half sadly from the fresco grand; Build up the spirit's dwelling-And is this,' mused I, 'all ye place! A temple of so Parian stone Would brook a marble god alone, Far-shrined from earth's bestain earned, High-vaulted brain and cunning hand, That ye to greater men could teach The skill yourselves could never reach?' Yet, as sometimes the peasant's 'And who were they,' I mused, |