THE CONQUEROR WORM.

Lo! 'tis a gala night

Within the lonesome latter years.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theater, to see

A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly,-

Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

That motley drama-oh, be sure

It shall not be forgot!

With its Phantom chased for evermore, By a crowd that seize it not,

Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the selfsame spot,

And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!

It writhes!-it writhes!-with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbrued.

Out-out are the lights-out all!

And, over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"

And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

TO ONE IN PARADISE.

Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine,-
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,

All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!

A voice from out the Future cries, "On! on!" But o'er the Past

(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! with me

The light of Life is o'er!

"No more

no more-no more

(Such language holds the solemn sea

To the sands upon the shore)

Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree.

Or the stricken eagle soar!

And all my days are trances,

And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams,-
In what ethereal dances,

By what eternal streams.

TO F S S. O-D.

Thou wouldst be loved? Then let thy heart
From its present pathway part not!
Being everything which now thou art
Be nothing which thou art not.
So with the world thy gentle ways,
Thy grace, thy more than beauty,
Shall be an endless theme of praise,
And love—a simple duty.

THE CITY IN THE SEA.

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst

and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

There shrines and palaces and towers

(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently--

Gleams up the pinnacles far and free-
Up domes-up spires-up kingly halls—
Up fanes-up Babylon-like walls-
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers-