OUR POETICAL FAVORITES.

Soul and Body.

EFORE the beginning of years

BEFLORI

There came to the making of man

Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with sin for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven;
And madness, risen from hell;
Strength, without hands to smite;
Love, that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light;

And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand
Fire and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand

From under the feet of the years,

And froth and drift of the sea,
And dust of the laboring earth,

And bodies of things to be

In the houses of death and of birth,
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,

With life before and after,

And death beneath and above,