behold, guard and threaten to sever with drawn blades. All this in rudest paint, with a belt of clouds surrounding and throwing a mist over the whole.

Further along and deeper into the gloom! Loud ring the startled echoes! An owl that has made his nest high up in the arches, hoots mournfully and flaps his lazy wings, that give forth a sound like the rush of disprisoned winds!

Further along and deeper into the gloom, and lo! a hall, ascended to by steps of stone, darker and gloomier and more solemn than the first! On the floor are skeletons grim of unnumbered human sacrifices. On the dank pavement human bones, with huge blocks of stone laid upon them, as if upon human bodies weights had been laid, and thus they had died. Further along, bones of the human frame sticking in the stone, where they had been built into the granite walls, like Ariel in heart of oak, and there had lingered, pined, agonized, and died!

Further along, the figure of a sphere, representing the earth, and painted on one side to represent land and on the other water, with figures drawn on it of outre shapes. Near the whole, and bending solemnly, is the statue of an old man with bare crown and flowing beard-weeping, weeping, sorely weeping! Weeping for the world seems the old rock-made father! And so wonders accumulate, and night deepening around us, we return to the upper air to bivouac by the light of blazing fires.

We sleep with Methusaleh, for our canopy is the heavens!

The want of love was big within the boy

His heart was sick with it—yet could not touch

The waters where the soul might drink and quicken.
The love whose taste is health-the faith whose strength
Stands in the stead of the teacher, suffering-

The deep belief in truth, and purity,

And tenderness, and in that mystic life
Whose double pulses keep a single time,
Imperfect emblem of an unity

More holy and complete the purest type

Of that pervading love which blends the flower
And star, the sun and cloud, the earth and wave,
And space and time, and all that they contain

Of good and evil into one glad whole-
Were hidden from him by the worldlier will
Which darkened them like swampy mists sent up
By the fat earth athwart a summer sky.

The tapers sparkled in the sconces. Light Flashed from the diamonds upon beauty's brow, And played on glancing neck and ivory shoulder, Sailing like swans amid the circling music

Which tuned it to their passage. Here the girl
Bent blushing, as her fingers pressed the arm
Of some young flatterer whom the idle hour
Warmed into all but love; and here the dame,
Whose preservation laughed at two-score years,
Tried her dark eyes on twenty's idle heart;
And here the mother trotted out the daughter
Before an elder son-a skillful jockey,

Bringing her paces out; while here a tongue

Which might have charmed a world-had he who owned it
Known how to use it-dealt in trope, and jest,

And trite philosophy, and witty scandal,
Hired by applause and flattery for the night.
Dazzling was all, but hollow. Paint and varnish
Upon a rottenness—a whitened tomb,

In which corruption, draped and garlanded
Into the look of health, held hectic revel.

Among the others was the boy; his eye
Dilating as it wandered round the room,
In feverish search of pleasure; his hot lip
Jerking bright nothings out from time to time-
The glittering bubbles which a lazy brain

Throws off instead of thoughts. His tongue brake off--
None asked him why. Such things are tricks of trade,
Accepted, although seen through. He was lost
In sudden dream. His wandering will was wrapt
In that abstraction, whose internal power
Compels the impalpable glory-robe divine!
So rarely worn in substance, though in seeming,
So stale a cheat? Not he. He may have dallied
With trifles, tampered with the strength he should
Have put to healthy use, and turned, unread,
The page on which the mystery is written-
That endless volume of the Truth, that asks
The practised muscle of a tireless toil
To solve its secrets-Life. But not, as yet
Have his contracting instincts settled down,
Into the wisdom of the charlatan-

Not yet, all learnt his part in the great farce-
Deluded only, not corrupted yet.

He has beheld the thing his soul had needed, And as he saw it, every separate sense

Had sickened into faintness. She sate apart,
And looked upon the dancers. Near her, bent
A beardless trifler, buzzing gentle words
Into her ear; and sometimes she replied,
And sometimes not, but with a listless gesture
Made mute assent. Upon her marble cheek
Youth flushed not, nor was painted. The clear hazel

Of her large eye, was as a silent lake

In the heart of a mountain the winds visit not.

One longing look the boy plunged into it,
Searching its depths-as of a memory
Suddenly waking, or a dim desire

Struggling into conception, which would probe

Their slumbering secrets. It chanced her look met his,
And as it did so, his sight staggered back,

Blinded and drunken. With parting word to none,
He turned him from her, and went slowly home.

They met. How, where, or when, needs not to tell.
They mixed in the same world, and so they met.
They met again, and weeks passed by and found
The dreamer at her house a guest; and weeks
Were added to these, and found him daily there.

The standers-by looked at his love, and laughed.

Some thought she fooled him. Others thought the husband The fool; and both were wrong. He only used him.

Traders in life have uses for all men;

And pen-craft, most of all, has ready uses

To which the worldly-wise may put its master.

She-well, perhaps she loved him. Why repeat
The tale, that is so old, and yet so new,
Of an unhallowed passion; the stale story,
Which has as many owners as the wind

Points of the compass; the madness that so many
Have share in, although each one thinks the pang
So, if they can,

His own more special curse?

Let them believe and suffer.

The losing gamester

May die or cure, but he who stakes false counters

Upon the chances of the game, when hearts
Are thrown for, rises, even if he wins,
Corrupting and corrupted to the core.

He spake to her, and she had loved before

Whom she should not have loved, and so she told him.

But still he spake, until her passion clung

To one whose passion listened, yet could feel
The wrong her husband loathed and yet endured,
No sin against itself. The boy drank deep

In that fierce joy, which, while it quenches thirst,
Leaves the impurer habit of desire

In him whose parching throat it cools; and still,
He thirsted. Like a newly-kindled flame,
Love in her soul broader and larger, ever,
By that it fed on, grew.-Alone with him

She worships, let her hear no other tongue,
And gaze upon and feel no eye but his.
Oh! for some lonely home among the hills,
Or in the desert, where the winds might be
The only chorus to her trembling sighs.
He listened to the burning words she sobbed
Amongst her kisses. He already knew,
Or, if he had not known, he learnt it now,
The void his aimless toil had left within him;
For now his heart was full. So, at her word,
He flung from him all youth had done-abjured

The hopes which he had nursed-priced thought and word
At market value only, and reared up

With his own hand, the hills, and made the desert,
Which shut them out from others, of free will.

The four far dwellers in the mountain-slopes,
Where he had stolen the wild-nuts from the squirrels,
And dreamt among the sheep-walks, heard the tale
As the world told it. They knew nothing more
Than that the boy had sinned. The father groaned,
And with a quicker footstep trod the road
Man never travels twice. The mother wept,
Like Rachel for her children, for a time.
The curate smiled less frequently, and knelt
More often in the boy's behalf, and sought.
A palliation even for the sin,

In those occasional frailties, which at times
Darkened across his own meek faith.

The sister

Dried her first tears, and was a human sunbeam,

Lighting their woe with those warm smiles which cheat Frost to belief in summer; yet thinking still,

In the unselfish silence of her sadness,

It would not have been thus, had she been there.